Meet the French Game Show Contestant Who Won 646 Times in a Row (and 23 Cars)

Much feels in flux in France these days. Will yo-yoing tariffs hit businesses? Is Perrier really that natural? And don’t even get started on the volatile summer heat.

But for the past 21 months, fans of a popular French game show have lived by a simple, ironclad certainty. Tune in at noon on any given day, and without fail, there he was: a soft-spoken young man named Émilien, with wiry round glasses and an astonishing depth of trivia knowledge.

Just as reliably, Émilien beat the other contestants. Again, and again, and again.

Although he has declined to reveal his last name for privacy reasons, Émilien is now a celebrity of sorts in France for his record-breaking winning streak on a show called “Les Douze Coups de Midi,” or “The Twelve Strokes of Noon.” Starting on Sept. 25, 2023, he competed 647 times and netted 2.56 million euros, about $3 million, in cash and prizes.

But it came to an end on Sunday, when a single defeat ended his reign.

Émilien, now 22, is as incredulous as the rest of us that he got that far.

“It’s a crazy story,” he said by phone this week. “I never expected it to last that long.”

Broadcast on the TF1 television network, each day’s show has four contestants compete in a series of trivia quizzes. The winner — le Maître de Midi, or Master of Noon — defends that title the next day.

“My goal was always the same,” Émilien said. “Every day, from the first to the 647th, to still be there at the end of the show, to do my best and come back the next day.”