There was still a faint hope. It was extinguished this Sunday afternoon on the Lac de Maine jumping area in Angers (Maine-et-Loire). Renaud Lavillenie, 37, failed to create a surprise at the French athletics championships. Hampered by windy conditions, the pole vaulter from Clermont stalled three times at 5.72m. A bar far, too far from the 5.82m required to achieve the Olympic minimums to hope to see the Paris 2024 Olympic Games.
Sidelined from competitions for many months after an operation for a partial rupture of the hamstring tendon of the left thigh in September 2023, this reference of French sport had not been able to do better than this mark of 5.72 m. It is a dream that is closing for the one who had applied for the honorary mission of flag bearer.
End of career? Hard to say
“What I’m being asked to do to go to the Games is a performance that I’ve already achieved more than 150 times in competition,” explained the athlete before the competition, refusing to give in to pessimism. “If I add in the training, I must have passed this bar between 400 and 500 times in my entire life. So, there’s a certain form of relaxation, I tell myself that I knew how to do it. And my body remembers it.”
Unfortunately, reality has caught up with Auvergnat. He had not reached or exceeded the fateful 5.82 m since the World Championships in Eugene (United States) in July 2022. The sign of a real downgrade for the man with 18 national titles since 2010, covered in Olympic gold in 2012 in London and world record holder from 2014 to 2020 (6.16m).
“I couldn’t free myself”
The day ends with a bitter third place as the competition was won by his designated successor Thibaut Collet (5.82m).
“The conditions today were a bit unusual, with a headwind in my face to take off. I need points of reference and I didn’t manage to free myself during the race. It’s down to very little. I failed by very little, so to speak. It’s high-level sport, that’s how it is,” he said on La Chaîne l’Equipe. “Despite everything, securing the podium is not so insignificant in such a random and dense discipline. Physically, I felt good. The only thing is that I couldn’t free myself, like many others. That’s where it’s frustrating.”
He is already thinking about 2025
This failure in Angers should not be synonymous with the end of his career. The athlete has regularly indicated that he sees himself continuing, guided by the notion of pleasure. “The near future is to go to the Paris meeting in Charléty next weekend. First, I didn’t have this operation for nothing nine months ago. I just wanted to do pole vaulting again without pain, that’s checked, I’m enjoying it again. It was important to me, even to be able to jump with my children in the longer term. So I’m not going to stop pole vaulting. Especially since I managed to compete with the best French people in a very short time. I continue to project myself towards the end of the season. I tell myself that I just didn’t do it for nothing. And then, we’ll think about 2025.”
In any case, this weekend sounds like the end of an era. The 2016 Olympic pole vault champion, the Brazilian Thiago Braz, also did not achieve the required minimums. Suspended sixteen months for doping, he was still authorized to jump on Saturday.
