Maxime Valet, Brianna Vidé and their teammates began their marathon at the Grand Palais on Tuesday 3 September. This is not a running race, as the venue is not suitable for it, but a series of events during the Paralympic wheelchair fencing competitions, which will take place until 7 September. Committed to all three weapons, the Toulouse native will be on the slopes of the Grand Palais every day: she shot sabre on Tuesday and will have to continue on Wednesday in foil, individual, then in team the following day, and finally in épée on Friday and Saturday: team sabre does not feature in the Paralympic Games.
The same programme for her teammates Clémence Delavoipière and Cécile Demaude, with the exception of the individual foil for the latter. With only three women selected for the Games (there were none in Tokyo in 2021), the French team management could not afford to let one of them rest if they wanted the Bleses to be represented in all the events on the programme (three fencers are needed to form a team).
The men – Ludovic Lemoine, Yohan Peter, Damien Tokatlian and Maxime Valet – will also be lining up at several tables if they do not win the Grand Slam at the Grand Palais. Because, for some as for others, juggling between sabre, foil and épée is a specificity of armchair fencing, which is not found at the highest level among “trained” athletes. During the Olympic Games, Manon Apithy-Brunet (sabre) and Yannick Borel (épée) will only compete, individually and in teams, with their favourite weapons.
Sébastien Barrois, the director of performance for the tricolour fencing team, would have liked to have had one or two additional invitations to the Paris Games. Especially given, he argues, the size of some delegations such as Ukraine (nine fencers), Italy (ten) or China (twelve), other strongholds of the discipline. But the two classifications of the discipline – category A (disability affecting a lower limb) and B (disability impeding mobility of the trunk) – do not allow for exaggerated figures.
“The techniques are different”
This hyper-versatility of wheelchair fencers is not without consequences. “It takes twice as much training, it is still very hardexplains Maxime Valet, triple Paralympic bronze medallist. I have a foil club and a sabre club in Toulouse, I have no problem switching between them, but you have to find your way around each one. »
You have 54.57% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.
