Handball - Team France

General
Silver medallists at Rio 2016, the French team secured a spot at the Tokyo Games through the Men's Olympic Qualification Tournaments held in March 2021. Competing in Tournament 2 with two teams scheduled to qualify, France topped the group with two wins and a loss. Portugal and Croatia had an identical record to the French of two victories and a defeat each, but the Croatians missed out on a place in Tokyo due to inferior goal difference.

The Tokyo Games are the French men's team's eighth consecutive Olympic tournament. They are two-time gold medallists, having secured victory in 2008 and 2012, and at Rio 2016 they just missed out becoming the first men's handball team to win three straight gold medals. A two-goal defeat to Denmark in the final dashed their hopes of creating history, and was all the more frustrating as they had already beaten the Danes in the group stage.

At the 2021 World Championship in Egypt, the French team emerged unbeaten from the group phase and main round to reach the quarterfinals. In the last eight, they scraped past Hungary in overtime before losing to Sweden in the semifinal 32-26. In the third-place playoff, Spain beat them 35-29. The result was only the fourth time in 15 tournaments, a period stretching back to 1993, that they had failed to secure a top-three finish. In that time they claimed six world titles, the most recent in 2017.

France are three-time European champions, winning titles in 2006, 2010, and 2014. At the most recent edition of the tournament in 2020, they were knocked out of the tournament in the group phase with losses to Portugal and Norway condemning them to their lowest final ranking at the event.