When everything goes wrong, we normally cling to the only certainties that remain. After its excellent carioca record in 2016 [6 médailles], the French athletics team had the hope of being able to count on an old tradition, that of the 110 m hurdles, to avoid the zero point just over two days before the end of the Olympic Games in Tokyo.
While the decathlete Kevin Mayer was trying to gradually nibble his delay on his competitors on the podium – 4th away from the leader Damian Warner – the tricolor hurdlers failed to give a little air to the Blues, Thursday 5 August at the zenith hour.
Pascal Martinot-Lagarde finished in fifth place despite his best time of the season, 13 seconds and 16 hundredths. Aurel Manga missed his final by finishing in last place in 13 seconds and 38 hundredths.
Ahead, Grant Holloway was on a mission. Bring the United States back to the podium in the 110m hurdles, since in 2016, for the first time in the history of the Games – apart from those in Moscow, in 1980, boycotted – no American hurdler had succeeded.
The 2019 world champion did not become Olympic champion but he will be content with second place (13 seconds and nine hundredths). It is the Jamaican Hansle Parchment (13 seconds and 4 hundredths) who succeeded his compatriot Omar McLeod, not qualified for this edition. The podium is completed by one of their compatriot, Ronald Levy (13 seconds and ten hundredths).
The good behavior of the two hurdlers in the semi-finals had made the French clan optimistic: “PML”, second with his best time of the season in 13 seconds and 25 hundredths and Manga who had equaled his personal best in 13 seconds and 24 hundredths.
The combined absences of defending champion Jamaican Omar McLeod, 2015 world champion Russian Sergey Shubenkov and Spaniard Orlando Ortega, reigning Olympic vice-champion, also opened up the competition a little wider. An opportunity they failed to seize.
Third French duo in the 110-meter hurdles final
At the Tokyo Olympic Stadium, the duo Pascal Martinot-Lagarde and Aurel Manga were the third to qualify together for an Olympic final. And again, Wilhem Belocian, eliminated in series, would have had the capacity to join them without a body “Not 100%. “
In 1968, at the Mexico Games, Marcel Durieux and Pierre Schoebel finished seventh and eighth. In 2016, Dimitri Bascou and Martinot-Lagarde, again, fought for the bronze medal, respectively third and fourth.
At World, Benjamin Crouzet, national trainer and coach of “PML” thus described the French culture of this very specific event five years ago, queen of twists and turns: “Not to mention school, since each runner has his own style, he analyzed, there is a tradition of hedges in France. ”
However, the tricolor athletics remains stuck at two Olympic medals. After the precursor Guy Drut, still the only gold medalist, in 1976 in Montreal, it took forty years for Dimitri Bascou to bring a second medal to the Blues.
Big names like Stéphane Caristan and Ladji Doucouré – titled in the European Championship for the first and the World Championship for the second – have missed an Olympic podium. Too often injured, sometimes unlucky … Caristan had finished 6th in Los Angeles in 1984, Doucouré had to be content with fourth place in Beijing, in 2008.
Injuries are also what disrupted Martinot-Lagarde’s season. In an interview with L’Equipe, Wednesday August 4, Benjamin Crouzet revealed that his athlete had only realized “Two specific sessions on hedges” in the last six months: “He’s got this thing, not rational, that makes him think he’s all right, that makes him go into warrior mode. His psyche takes over. “
Finally titled outdoors at the 2018 European Championships, the hurdler from Montgeron (Essonne) took third place in the world the following year in Doha. Even though he improved in each of his Olympic races, he missed that little extra.
Our selection of articles on the Tokyo 2021 Olympic Games