“Hurt my face”, announces Mathilde Gros after her rapid elimination

Eliminated in the quarterfinals of the individual speed by the Japanese Mina Sato during the track cycling world championships in Ballerup in Denmark, Mathilde Gros still managed to keep smiling this evening despite an obvious disappointment. He has two races left to try to get a medal: the 500 meters on Saturday, and the keirin on Sunday.

Two months after the cataclysm of the Paris Olympics, from which she left without a medal, Mathilde Gros advanced slowly during the individual speed tournament of the track cycling world championships in Ballerup. World champion in the discipline in 2022, the Provençale was unable to advance to the quarter-finals this Thursday. However, she had achieved the fourth fastest time in qualifying at the start of the afternoon on the Danish velodrome. “Honestly, I didn’t know how I was going to be physically, especially mentally,” she admitted after her elimination in the quarterfinals. “We always hope for better, it’s true that I would have liked to do the first time, I would have liked to pass the quarters. But hey, that’s how it is. It still did me good to resort after the Games.”

Because Mathilde Gros suffered a lot from this Olympic failure as she explained at the start of the week to L’Equipe and AFP. And this evening it was especially the smile that dominated his face. “Frankly, I’m happy to be here, even if it’s not necessarily easy because I just lost, so I’m disgusted. But I tried to remove all the extraneous things and concentrate on my race. On the first run, I wasn’t afraid, I hurt my legs. Unfortunately, she came back to me. The second run, I tried to do something different too. Unfortunately, I didn’t pull myself together enough.”

Now for the 500 meters and the keirin

Happy therefore despite everything for her return to competition, the Provençale will now turn to the rest of her program consisting in particular of the keirin on Sunday, and the unknown 500 meters, standing start, which she will compete on Saturday. Junior world champion in 2017 over this distance, she has never competed at such an elite level. “It’s a challenge, a challenge,” she explains. “It’s the last time that there is the 500 in an international competition. So, I have to hurt myself to try to go as far as possible.”

Enough to find additional motivation to try to heal the wounds opened by the failure of Paris 2024 despite the uncertainty over whether or not it will be competitive. “Each time, I was confined to another box, and I said to myself, why not,” encourages Mathilde Gros. “I added it to my program because there was a quota. Last week I did some training, I have nothing to lose, I want to hurt myself, it’s me against me. “