Paris, it’s over for Renaud Lavillenie – Libération

The French athletics championships in Angers represented the very last chance to win his Olympic ticket for the gold medalist in London in 2012.

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Don’t panic, we’ll see him jump again, even at the Charléty meeting on Sunday, July 7. But he won’t be at the Paris Olympics this summer. This Sunday, June 30, at the French championships in Angers – where Thibaut Collet won with a jump of 5.82m – Renaud Lavillenie failed in his final attempt to qualify, failing three times at 5.72m, after a very convincing jump of 5.60m. The Olympic minimums, set at 5.82m, were decidedly too high for the 37-year-old pole vaulter, who had hamstring surgery in September and was still not trained enough. His dream of a fourth consecutive Olympics ended in the capital of Angers with a bit of frustration (“it’s hard to finish so close to the goal, the day was intense, there were a lot of challenges, we all struggled with the wind, it’s frustrating when you’re condemned to the feat of playing for everything in a competition where you clearly can’t express yourself completely, jumping with smaller poles to manage the wind”), but ultimately without regret (“after my operation, I could have not been on the track today”). “I have nothing more to prove, my career is behind me, the biggest one at least,” he already told Libé during his preparation at a French team training camp. Paris, for me, is just a bonus. If I manage to qualify, and I’m going to give it my all, I’ll have this incredible opportunity to experience my fourth Olympics, and on home soil. If I don’t succeed, I’ll still have three in my backpack, including two medals.”

And unlike Christophe Lemaitre, Teddy Tamgho, Eloyse Lesueur or Benjamin Compaoré, who bid farewell to the competition on Saturday to the ovations of the Angers public, Lavillenie has not said his last word. If he decided to have surgery last year, he was perfectly aware that he risked compromising his chances of qualifying for the Olympics. Because the one who demolished Bubka with 6.16 m in 2014 assures him: “We must detach ourselves from the Games by telling ourselves that it is not the priority, the priority is to be in the condition to jump for the longest time possible.” At least every morning, on the carpet in his garden, as he likes to remind us.