Tanguy de La Forest, or a lesson in tenacity

Tanguy de La Forest, a para rifle shooter supported by Caisse d’Epargne Ile-de-France, competed in six Paralympic games before winning his first medals in Paris 2024. The joy he felt was even greater because of it!

Everyone engulfed by the same emotion

Tanguy de La Forest took his 19^th shot and came in 4^th place in the 50m prone rifle SH2 event of the Paralympic Games Paris 2024. This meant that Tanguy, supported by Caisse d’Epargne Ile-de-France, just missed out on winning a bronze medal… but this minor disappointment couldn’t dampen the immense joy these Games had given him. Virtually all of France was deeply moved by the emotions he expressed when he won the silver medal in the 10m rifle standing event, a medal symbolizing his willpower, tenacity, and uncompromising commitment!

Tanguy de La Forest discovered rifle shooting at a funfair when he was a child. This discipline proved compatible with Tanguy’s disability, a genetic neuromuscular disorder known as infantile spinal muscular atrophy. He was able to walk until the age of ten but since then he has been confined to an electric wheelchair and can’t lift anything heavier than 500g. This is why he competes in the rifle category for shooters with an upper limb impairment who wear a spring-loaded brace to carry the weight of the rifle without holding it. Tanguy joined the French national team in this category, and has been with them ever since. At the same time, he obtained a post-graduate diploma in marketing at the Sorbonne before joining the PSA Group and, in 2006, setting up a recruitment agency specializing in hiring people with disabilities, chiefly graduates.

Such a long way…

Tanguy competed in his first Paralympic Games in Athens in 2004, followed by Beijing, London, Rio and Tokyo in which he came 4^th twice and 5^th three times. Although these were extremely good results that enabled Tanguy to come home from the Games with a great deal of experience, he was disappointed to have missed out on a medal. But Tanguy persevered and never gave up. On Friday September 30, he found himself at the Châteauroux shooting range in the 10-meter final. The entire shooting community, and people far beyond, held their breath as he began shooting, focused on this intense, endearing, and exemplary individual forged by his journey through life. And Tanguy won his first medal at the Paralympic Games Paris 2024. At the age of 46!

The entire country was deeply moved by the strength and delicacy of his emotion. With the weight of repeated failure off his shoulders, he presented himself in the fullness of his abilities in the 10m prone final and gave a masterly performance. Slightly behind in the first part of the final, he finished in a state of ‘flow’ (as golfers say), shooting a series of 10.9s (the top score) and finishing with a considerable lead. It was as if all those years of hard work, training, successes and failures, those 4^th and 5^th places in previous Paralympics, had led him, here and now, to this point of consummate excellence on this shooting range in Châteauroux.

Everything Tanguy de La Forest had built up over the course of his life – his sport, his family, his work – fell into place, each one coherent and in harmony with the others…

To learn about the para athletes, athletes and teams supported by Groupe BPCE companies taking part in Paris 2024