École Polytechnique

While sport contributes towards physical development and improved motor control, it also plays a key role in developing every aspect of the personality.

Sports lessons and competitions give students an opportunity to develop their ability to go beyond their limits, take up challenges, communicate, cooperate, take instant decisions and improve their management of stress, all of which they need for a balanced life and the exercise of high levels of responsibility.

In this sense, competition helps to develop the École's image and helps students to discover and assert themselves in a context in which they are called upon to demonstrate values of loyalty, self-control and respect for others. All of these transformations take place gradually through the experience gained in lessons and organised sporting activities.

Practising a sport is a very important part of the human training of students.


The teaching places students at the centre of its approach: it considers their needs and motivations. This educational, humanist, ambitious attitude to sport is a deep-seated feeling.



* Quote from Aimé Jacquet