It’s a very unpleasant feeling at the time and a pathology which almost cost Cassandre Beaugrand a world title this Saturday, October 19. Because the triathlete, who is in fact a swimmer during a third of her events, suffers from… seasickness. And it is to avoid suffering too many consequences that she significantly deviated from her trajectory on Saturday during the last stage of the world circuit organized on Los Alamos beach in Torremolinos (Spain).
“I panicked a little at sea because I’m quite ill and things were moving quite a bit,” she told us after the race which included 1,500 meters of swimming in the Mediterranean. I did the swimming warm-up and I knew it was going to be complicated. » She explains: “In fact, I didn’t want to look too much at the buoy when I was swimming because it was shaking in all directions and I was afraid that looking into the distance would make me even more seasick.”
“These are the same symptoms as seasickness that you can experience on a boat,” points out Daniel Hirt, doctor for the Blues within the French Triathlon Federation. It’s nausea, uneasiness, the feeling of swaying… » All this results from a balance problem in the inner ear which destabilizes what Cassandre Beaugrand observes with her eyes.
Rehabilitation of the inner ear as a possible solution
In the water, the Olympic champion then focused “on her breathing” in order to “go forward” and not think too much about her bad feelings or about these waves and this current which were stirring her. But she lost her sense of direction. “I didn’t think I would be so lonely,” she admitted. I was almost in distress, I was lost at sea (laughter). I had a really hard time seeing the buoys with the waves, we were in a washing machine. »
If Beaugrand, who is also the only triathlete on the French team to suffer from seasickness, no longer suffers from the symptoms once she gets on the bike, she nevertheless plans to soon be able to find a solution. “It’s not the first time that this has happened to him and in general, things then dissipate with the intensity of the effort,” admits Daniel Hirt. “I’m going to try to resolve this problem because it can prevent me from swimming well,” she explains.
To remedy this, “there may be medications that we take as for seasickness,” suggests Daniel Hirt, who also suggests possible rehabilitation of the inner ear. “With physiotherapy, we can start with exercises to try to accustom the body to these discrepancies between what the body perceives through the ears and what the sight perceives. » And avoid additional stress or apprehension in the future for the new world champion.
