The 21-year-old Toulousain must have had anyone with a stake in a successful Paris 2024 purring with his three gold medals at last month's World Aquatics Championships in Fukuoka.

There are few factors more effective than a truly dominant swimmer for sending a country’s Olympic medal haul hurtling through the roof: ask Mark Spitz or Michael Phelps.

While some of us might feel this supports the case for pruning the Olympic aquatics programme, I would not expect such arguments to cut any ice either with French politicians desperate for a stack of medals to lift national morale and justify expenditure on the event, or an International Olympic Committee (IOC) always hungry for good news stories.

With golfer Céline Boutier winning the Evian Championship and impressive performances by French triathletes in the recent world championship series event in Sunderland, July has been an eye-catching month for athletes from the next Olympic host nation.

In light of this, it is perhaps no surprise that the entertainment and data technology group Gracenote should be forecasting a tally of 63 French medals, including no fewer than 32 golds, at Paris 2024.

The projection excludes Russian and Belarusian athletes, whose presence could clearly make a significant difference.

Nevertheless, France looks on track to deliver a big improvement on its 33-medal performance at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics two years ago.

That saw French athletes bring home 10 gold medals in all, including both Olympic handball titles, the same haul as at Rio 2016.

What a contrast current optimism makes with the dark days of the 1960s (which I have been swotting up on), for much of which French Olympic performance was at a particularly low ebb.

Rome was the nadir, the only Summer Olympics apart from St. Louis 1904 at which France claimed not a single gold medal.

Michel Jazy, who trailed in as best of the rest in a men’s 1500m event dominated by Australia’s Herb Elliot, was one of just two French silver medallists.

At Tokyo 1964, the catastrophe of two consecutive gold medal-less Summer Games was averted only on the very last day of competition by showjumper Pierre Jonquères d'Oriola, a member of a Perpignan-based family who had been winemakers for something like 25 generations.

Pierre’s cousin, Christian d’Oriola, was already one of France’s most decorated Olympians, having picked up four fencing gold medals between 1948 and 1956.

No wonder the celebrated sportswriter Antoine Blondin felt moved to comment: "With us, gold medals are family jewels."

He went on: "This Marseillaise, whose tune we had forgotten - and let’s not mention the words - would therefore be heard in the final seconds of these Games."

It was France's next Summer Games gold medal, won during the stupendous athletics competition at Mexico City in 1968, that stopped the rot and enabled the country finally to put its Olympic blues behind it.

This should have happened earlier in the year as skier and future IOC member Jean-Claude Killy emerged as the out-and-out hero of his home Winter Games in Grenoble.

But the nation was then convulsed by the trauma of May 1968.

As rioters took to the streets of Paris, a slender 400m runner from a provincial seaside resort in Charente-Maritime was altitude training in the Pyrenees in near total obscurity.

This would pay off some five months later in thin air on the other side of the Atlantic, when a blistering final 100 metres propelled the little-known Colette Besson past several rivals, including the favourite, Lillian Board, so-called "golden girl" of British athletics, whom she pipped on the line.

As a child in England, experiencing his first Olympic Games through the medium of a bog standard black and white television set, this race left a searing memory as one of my first serious sports disappointments.

In France, by contrast, Besson’s tears of joy and unforced natural charm chivvied along a process of national healing in train since early elections, called in the wake of the protests, delivered a landslide for the Gaullists.

The day after Besson sprang her spectacular upset, the French Olympic cycling team set off on a gold rush that would see its members claim four of the five track titles available in Mexico.

France's spell in the Summer Olympic doldrums was decisively over; it ended the last Summer Olympics of the 1960s with seven gold medals, a puny return compared with what is expected next year, but its biggest haul for two decades.