“Getting back in the saddle quickly allows you to forget” – LeVif / L’Express on PC

His last fight ended in defeat. Benjamin Harmegnies is already eliminated from the 2018 European Championship when he settles in the stands of the Shlomo Group Arena in Tel Aviv to watch the final of his friend Toma Nikiforov. “I then start to sweat, I suddenly experience the symptoms of a big flu. When I stand up, everything revolves around me and I almost collapse on the ground.” Somehow, the judoka finds his doctor, who installs him on a treatment table and gives him medicine. Meanwhile, Nikiforov wins. Benjamin raises his head for a moment. When he goes back to bed, the doctor arrives with four members of the Israeli medical team, armed with an electrocardiograph. “He takes my blood pressure ‘to be sure’, then tells me that an ambulance is on the way. As he doesn’t add much, I laugh, I tell him that all that is not necessary.” At this precise moment, Doctor Schoonejans is fully aware of what is happening. In a half-reassuring, half-worrying tone, his diagnosis fuses: the young athlete has a heart attack. “Now you’re trying to accept what’s happening to you. Then you realize it’s over.” It’s painful, but irrefutable: his pro career has just come to an end. Four days before his 28th birthday.
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His last fight ended in defeat. Benjamin Harmegnies has already been eliminated from the 2018 European Championship when he settles in the stands of the Shlomo Group Arena in Tel Aviv to watch his friend Toma Nikiforov’s final. “I then start to sweat, I suddenly experience the symptoms of a big flu. When I stand up, everything revolves around me and I almost collapse on the ground.” Somehow, the judoka finds his doctor, who installs him on a treatment table and gives him medicine. Meanwhile, Nikiforov wins. Benjamin raises his head for a moment. When he goes back to bed, the doctor arrives with four members of the Israeli medical team, armed with an electrocardiograph. “He takes my blood pressure ‘to be sure’, then tells me that an ambulance is on the way. As he doesn’t add much, I laugh, I tell him that all that is not necessary.” At this precise moment, Doctor Schoonejans is fully aware of what is happening. In a half-reassuring, half-worrying tone, his diagnosis fuses: the young athlete has a heart attack. “Now you’re trying to accept what’s happening to you. Then you realize it’s over.” It’s painful, but irrefutable: his pro career has just come to an end. Four days before his 28th birthday. As a child, Borain’s heart swung between volleyball and judo. He likes the dynamics of the first, he loves rubbing shoulders with his family in the practice of the second. The year he turned 12, everything smiled on him: he was crowned junior Belgian champion on the tatami mats and, ball in hand, reached the final of the national championship with his club, VQC Wasmuel. He will learn later that it was at this precise moment that his parents refused selection for the national volleyball team, preferring to let the boy concentrate on his other favorite sport. “I think I could have reached a good level in volleyball, even if I wasn’t tall enough,” he admits. As a teenager, Benjamin definitely turned his back on the net when he joined the Namur hotel school, in boarding school. Until he graduated from high school, he went through physical preparation during the week and judo training at weekends. A low intensity which does not prevent him from accumulating titles, and from being crowned a second time Belgian junior champion. “That’s when the Flemish Federation contacted me to join the national team. My parents hesitated: school was expensive, they didn’t want me to shoot down their entire budget. Fortunately, they found an arrangement and I was able to participate in my first international tournament, in Belfort, where I won one or the other fight.” The Hornutois is launched on the path of high-level sport. Unwilling to start studying after his six hours of daily training, he then applied to the Royal Military School (ERM) where he won a Top Sport contract, reserved for professionals. “It involved taking part in military competitions and, above all, performing in civilian life. In theory, I had to spend half a day a week in the army and scrupulously follow training programs the rest of the time. In the end, I I only left the room during the visits of officers.” The student Harmegnies is gifted. In 2010, he won his first title of Belgian champion, category over 100 kilos, among seniors. Shortly after, he joined the club of judoka Elco van der Geest, where the majority of the Dutch national team plays. “During the first training, I was already exploded after the forty-five minutes of warm-up. Then Elco started the randoris (Editor’s note: the fights). I couldn’t believe the rhythm. Fortunately, over time, I got used to it and it allowed me to be at the top of the European Under-23 rankings for two years.” In 2013 alone, the guy won six medals, including bronze at the European Championship. Everything is shaping up perfectly to consider participation in the Rio Olympics. But tensions are emerging within the Federation, Judo Vlaanderen, which imposes collective sessions “without taking care of me” and whose performance pressure weakens the Borain, who receives several injuries in a few weeks. He is disgusted. “Psychological support in sport is always a taboo subject. However, at that time, I would have stopped judo if it had not been for the support of my mental coach Geoffrey Mahieu. I was locked up in a tunnel, when I needed to see what was happening left and right. Lots of conversations with Geoffrey took me far. I didn’t feel like I was working, in reality I was expanding my horizon.” Once the vacuum is in his head, Benjamin binds to the French-speaking Federation and struggles to obtain the points necessary for his qualification for Rio. Alas, he is injured again. Bye bye, Brazil and the Top Sport contract. To be able to continue to live his passion, he must now provide, in parallel, thirty-eight hours a week of self-defense lessons at the ERM. Never mind, the young man has character. He gradually regained a taste for judo, then signed his return to the ranking of the twenty-five best in the world. His performances even ensured him the reattribution of his Top Sport contract. But first, there is this famous European Championship in Tel-Aviv… This evening of April 28, 2018, Benjamin is immediately taken care of by an Israeli cardiologist. “He went through the artery to put me a stent. It made him laugh a lot, he showed me on the screen where he was precisely located in my heart. I felt absolutely nothing, apart from the very strange feeling of knowing that everything was done in me.” In the process, the Belgian celebrates his birthday, infusion in the arm. Above all, I was delighted to still be there to experience it” – then saw a host of specialists arrive at his bedside, without understanding the origin of his discomfort. “They asked me if I had taken doping products. This was not the case, but no one wanted to believe me since they had no other hypothesis.” Back in Belgium after ten days, the young man gave up on high-level competition; he will never again have the resistance necessary to titillate the greatest. At the beginning of his convalescence, he is knocked out after climbing ten stairs and takes an hour to cover two kilometers on foot. “It was hard, but it also allowed me to recover quickly. On June 1, a short month after the illness, I was at the ERM teaching self-defense. Getting back in the saddle quickly allows you to forget, to think about something else.” But that’s not always enough. So, Benjamin contacts Georges Baghdi Sar, his best friend at the hotel school, today at the head of a Syrian street food chain. “He offered to grill two or three nights a week in one of his restaurants. One day I was a clerk, the next I was a chef. I saw myself again as a child, when I went to cook on Wednesday afternoons at my godmother’s, a caterer. At the time, I managed to invent a lot of pastry stuff and I told myself that I was going to open a restaurant. But once graduated, I preferred first to take advantage of the good years that were available to me in judo.” It was his time at Baghdi Sar that convinced Benjamin to bring his Horeca project out of the drawers. Between the confinements, he followed an accelerated mini-training in a chip shop in Ghlin. Then, he remodeled a shack in La Bouverie, in the entity of Frameries, to install his apartment on the first floor and his commercial area on the ground floor. is inspired by his time in his friend’s oriental canteen and revisits the fundamentals by integrating what he appreciated in the cuisine of the countries he passed through during his sports career.Opened in 2020, Big Ben Theory is a street food address, with its take-out and eat-on-the-go dishes, whose name is not just a reference to the famous American series, but rather the “massive Hénuier method”, which consists in realizing the most beautiful culinary marriages. “I try to associate ier certain specialties from abroad with dishes from home, such as fries. Recently, I added to the menu a Korean beef marinated with onions and a spicy sauce. A killer, but I still have to work on it to bring it closer to the standards appreciated in Belgium. We can’t do just anything: noodles with fries, it’s obviously not”, he laughs. For the former judoka, reconnecting with the stoves after almost ten years of stopping is a real challenge. “It’s a bit like cycling: you quickly find certain habits, but after such a long break, you can never win the Tour de France again. In the kitchen, it’s the same.” No regrets, however, since Benjamin Harmegnies has above all the ambition to offer “a nice little thing”, which he manages as a family, with his brother. “I don’t just want to launch a restaurant to then let it turn: I like to cook, it’s my hobby.”