Our story, our values, our commitments

It all began in 1976 in Englos (France). Michel Leclercq and his teammates imagined a revolutionary concept: bringing all sports together under one roof. This was the birth of the very first DECATHLON store. Our identity quickly took off: in 1982, we launched our famous jingle and our legendary slogan "À fond la forme". That same year, we opened our first warehouse to manage our own logistics and guarantee the best prices for our customers. In 1985, we made a splash with our very first TV advert featuring Tarzan.

The year 1986 marked a major turning point. We decided to move beyond just retailing and start manufacturing our own products with the creation of "DECATHLON Production". Our very first 100% in-house product? A bike frame! This was also the year we crossed borders with our first store opening in Germany, and launched TROCATHLON to give sports gear a second life. In the 1990s, we accelerated our growth. We inaugurated our major DECATHLON Campus site in Villeneuve-d'Ascq and, in 1996, gave birth to our first in-house brands ("Passion Brands"): Tribord for water sports and Quechua for mountain sports. To push innovation even further, we created the DECATHLON SportsLab in 1997, our scientific laboratory dedicated to studying the human body in motion.

In the early 2000s, DECATHLON expanded to the four corners of the globe, from Brazil and Russia to China. Guided by our value of sharing, we created the DECATHLON Foundation in 2004 to support social inclusion projects through sport. That same year, our Quechua teams revolutionised camping by inventing the famous "2 Seconds" tent. Mindful of our impact, we launched our e-commerce website in 2006 and simultaneously introduced our first eco-designed products to the shelves. This was also when we brought our experts together into dedicated hubs (Domyos Center, Inesis Golf Park) to design the future of sport right alongside active sports enthusiasts.

In 2010, we opened the B'Twin Village in Lille, a paradise for cycling enthusiasts. By 2012, we pioneered environmental labelling, allowing our customers to compare the impact of our products. We continued to grow with the opening of the Mountain Store at the foot of the Alps and the Kipstadium for team sports, crossing the symbolic milestone of 1,000 stores worldwide in 2015. For our 40th anniversary in 2016, we chose to officially put sustainable development at the heart of our corporate strategy.

In 2024, we celebrated a new era with the rollout of our new visual identity and brand logo, symbols of our constant evolution. Today, we are more than 100,000 teammates energised across over 1,700 stores worldwide to support you in your sports. Our ambition for the future? To tackle the climate challenge. We have set ourselves a clear target: to reduce our absolute CO2​ emissions by 20% (compared to 2021). To achieve this, we are sustainably transforming our models, with a sharp focus on eco-design, product durability, repair, and growing Second Life. The story goes on, and we are writing it with you every day out on the pitch!