A final lap of madness and an unreal final stretch, played out in a deafening atmosphere thanks to the crowd at the Stade de France. On Saturday 31 August, at the Saint-Denis sports centre (Seine-Saint-Denis), Antoine Praud overtook his competitors one by one to snatch third place in the 1500m, T46 category (people with muscular impairments in the upper limbs). On the second day of the athletics events at the 2024 Paralympic Games, the 20-year-old Breton brought the first medal to the French team.
“ [C’était] a sick race. Better than in my dreams. Second is really not far away.explains. When I saw that I was going too fast, I told myself that I had to grit my teeth. My opponents gave in on the last lap, but I didn’t. » “With this audience, I couldn’t break downadds Antoine Praud. It was he who gave me strength in the last hundred meters to achieve this third place. My ears were ringing in the final straight. »
Until then, this engineering student had never run in front of such a large crowd: “About 4,000 people” during the international meeting of sports for the disabled in Paris in June, “maybe a little more” during the 2023 World Championships, also in Paris, he recalls. The day before, his teammate Valentin Bertrand had warned him after competing in the 100 metres. “He told me, ‘You’re going to see the noise when you go out on the track.’ I enjoyed rallying the crowd to capture this positive energy.”he explained.
Personal best improved by four seconds
Present in the crowd, Olympic athlete Léna Kandissounon (800 m) admires the man with whom she shares training at Haute Bretagne Athlétisme, a club based in Ille-et-Vilaine: “It was his best race tactically. He really used the crowd in his last 300 metres. He had the race of his life at the right time.”
Like sprinter Marie Ngoussou, the youngest member of the French delegation at 15, the middle-distance runner was dragged by the arm during a difficult birth. Since then, she has suffered from paralysis of the right brachial plexus, which causes her to lose her balance when running, in particular swinging her arm from right to left and blocking acceleration.
To win the bronze medal, the runner improved his personal best by four seconds, to 3 min 51 s 37, finishing behind Australian Michael Roeger and Russian Aleksandr Iaremchuk (running under a neutral flag). In one year, he lowered his record by more than ten seconds, going from 4:03.90 to 3:55.39 at the end of May.
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