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Another day without a medal for tricolor armchair fencing, which has so far only won one, Thursday: bronze in the men’s team foil event. The program for this Friday, September 6 was individual epee, and the Blues stalled, both on the women’s side and the men’s side. To the great dismay of a Grand Palais which once again played the third musketeer. “How are you ? It will be better after the Games,” squeaks Brianna Vidé, coming out of the repechage match lost in the afternoon, against the Thai Aphinya Thongdaeng. The Toulouse fencer adds: “It’s difficult to digest because I felt limited in my movements, by boxes that don’t speak to me. As I am very mobile in the chair [avec lequel le bretteur doit toujours rester en contact d’au moins une fesse, ndlr]I’m used to taking cards but here, I took some with one referee and not with the other…”
This misunderstanding of refereeing is a repetition. Thursday, after the women’s foil team failed in the quarter-final against Hungary, Brianna Vidé, who is the leader, already deplored “a difficult match with a judgment which was not at all in our favor and which was not at the level of the Games, like yesterday. They are the same referees only for the match that I lost [au fleuret en individuel la veille]». Maxime Valet also complained about certain decisions during his last foil match on Tuesday.
“No match is easy”
That said, Brianna Vidé emphasizes that the forces involved are considerable: “Frankly, when I’m in the call room and I look at the names of all the athletes competing, no match is easy, I don’t want to meet any of the fifteen.” Her teammates Clémence Delavoipière and Cécile Demaude also suffered from this competition, led by China. So, when a colleague says to him “Tomorrow [samedi]we absolutely have to go and get a medal!” on the occasion of the team epee, the champion returns, as one wards off bad luck: “We won medals, we were vice-champions of Europe, at the world championships we didn’t finish far, we lost 45-44, we finished fourth… The charms, it doesn’t matter, we end up putting them away in a cupboard, the Grand Palais on the other hand, makes irreplaceable memories.”
Brianna Vidé, like Yohan Peter, losing in the men’s epee draw, became one with the public, clearly very comfortable. She confirms, by pointing out the tactical interest: “We worked on this aspect in mental preparation. We have a very “French-encouraging” audience, let’s say, so if I don’t play with them when I have moments of “down” and doubt… What’s better than heating up the room and having some noise , which gives us maybe thirty seconds more [avant de combattre] because the referee can’t say “Come on”. It allows me to breathe, to take away all this good energy and expel the bad energy that I don’t need on the track.