On Thursday 29 August, France, which had succumbed to Olympic fever, took up its favourite sport of the summer: freediving. The same chlorinated decor, the same electrified crowd, the same coat of arms with fleur-de-lis. Ugo Didier from Toulouse, born eight months before Léon Marchand, followed in the footsteps of the four-time Olympic champion by giving the French delegation its first Paralympic gold medal on home soil in the 400m freestyle (category S9).
Obviously, the concert hall of Nanterre (Hauts-de-Seine), transformed during the Games into a swimming pool (in the form of a kit), never tires of listening to The Marseillaise For a month, Ugo Didier took his Toulouse alter ego to the point of reproducing the same suspense scenario and, in turn, causing the 15,000 spectators at the Paris La Défense Arena to panic.
At the end of 4 min 12 s 55 of a race of great strategy, the tortoise from Cugnaux (Haute Garonne) had the last word over the hare Simone Barlaam, double world champion. only 6my At the end of the first 100m, far, far behind the Italian, the Frenchman is back in third place.my He is at the halfway point. This is the moment when he makes his effort, caught in the wave of his neighbour to make the most of his aspiration. Spurred on by an incandescent crowd, the 22-year-old swimmer swallows up his transalpine rival in the last length, as a nod to Léon Marchand’s fantastic comeback over Kristof Milak in the 200m butterfly during the Olympic Games.
“I’m glad the wheel has turned”
The man who was nicknamed “no calves” by his teammates when he joined the French national team – he was born with club feet and atrophied lower muscles – could finally climb onto the first step of the podium that had been denied to him since 2017 on the world stage.
This Marseillaise, “She was amazing, in the last few years I was unlucky to finish 2myI was a bit fed up with this second place, today I’m happy that the wheel has turned. Ugo Didier savoured it with moist eyes, three years after winning silver in this distance in Tokyo. Normally I’m not moved by swimming, but today she proved me wrong. »
It swept away the disappointments of the last Games. “I was very stressed in Tokyo, here it was the opposite, I was calm from start to finish.” The difficulties of the season have been forgotten, when the swimmer questioned his entire swimming career to compensate for his lack of power. Back, the doubts after a “catastrophic winter”The Parisian summer has given way to certainties.
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