This second international festival of French-speaking sports reporting took place on 12-17 December 2006 at Forges-les-Eaux in Seine-Maritime, France. The panel of judges, presided over by journalist-writer Denis Lalanne, awarded seven prizes. Christine Thomas, a leading reporter for Equipe Magazine, was awarded a prize in the print journalism category for her report: Carnets d'Afghanistan.
Focusing on the lives of two men who symbolize Afghan football, Ali Asker lali and Zalmaï Payenda (the former opted for exile; the latter couldn’t bring himself to leave), Christine Thomas paints the picture of a country torn apart by war, where sports are slowly but surely helping to restore normality. The report appeared in Equipe Magazine No. 1247 on 20 May 2006 and was also turned into a photo-cartoon by Le Photographe’s cartoon-strip team.
This is not Christine Thomas’s first award. Since winning a Jean-Luc Lagardère Foundation grant in 1995, she was the first woman to be awarded the Pierre Chany prize for the best cycling article in 2002 and received the 2004 Martini Prize (now the Crédit Lyonnais prize) for the best sports article of the year.

Achievements since winning the grant
Thanks to her Jean-Luc Lagardère Foundation grant, in 1996 Christine was able to complete her specified project: a report on professional refereeing. “An imposing little fellow, dressed in black, in the midst of a match where the stakes are extremely high”: referees are often failed players or coaches, and may be dispensers of justice and even victims at times. Her report on the “Man in Black” was published at the beginning of 1996 in Equipe Magazine, where she became a permanent freelancer and was eventually hired in January 1999. Responsible for following the French national rugby team as of 1997, Christine covered the 1999 Rugby World Cup and the 2003 Rugby World Cup in Australia; at the same time, she covered three Tour de France cycling events from 2001 to the centenary edition in 2003. More recently, Christine covered the 2006 Football World Cup held in Germany. She is also one of the authors of Viv^re le Sport, a beautiful book produced at the instigation of the Jean-Luc Lagardère Foundation and published jointly with Editions du Chêne in September 2006. For each book sold, two euros will be given to the non-profit organization Foot Citoyen for the promotion of citizenship values in football