“A great pick” for his trainer, a “mini-me” for Olympic champion Benjamin Thomas: Oscar Nilsson-Julien, a young man with three passports, was still running for Great Britain two years ago. Today, he embodies the future of French track cycling.
“I come from a family of writers and I do velodrome laps.” This is how this son of a Franco-Swedish journalist and an English screenwriter presents himself, who enters the competition on Saturday at the World Championships in Ballerup, in the suburbs of Copenhagen.
“I like Scandinavia, as I am Swedish,” slips the 22-year-old runner.
Swedish and French through his father, yes. British, too, having been born and raised in London. But it is in the jersey of the French team that he is now racing.
“With three nationalities, I feel a bit of everything,” says with a slight accent the man who attended the bilingual high school in Kentish Town, the district of north London where he was born.
As a child, he discovered the track in the wake of his father Olivier, on the Herne Hill velodrome, one of the oldest in the world, built in 1891, south of London.
– “English model too closed” –
Gifted, he becomes a great hope of British cycling, European hopeful champion of the omnium in 2022.
But he first dreams of a destiny on the road and it is with this objective in mind that he joins AVC Aix-en-Provence in DN1, the highest amateur level, in 2023.
He then “gave up a little on doing the track with the English”, cooled by their reluctance to promote him directly to the elite category.
Barely arrived in the south of France, he watches the European Track Championships on television with the manager of his new club, Jean-Michel Bourgoin, who asks him: “but why aren’t you run there for England?”
“I explain the reasons to him a little and he says to me: I know Steven (Henry, the coach of the French endurance team). Do you want me to send him a message? Three days later, Steven m ‘call.’
Steven Henry remembers it very well. “Jean-Michel Bourgoin told me: I have an Englishman coming to my house but he is also French and I think things are not going very well with the English Federation. I called him straight away. He found the too closed English model. Here, we are a little more open. That’s what he was looking for and he liked it.”
– “It’s going to hurt” –
Oscar quickly took steps to obtain French sporting nationality, which he obtained in December 2023, in time to participate in the 2024 European Championships, where he won a bronze medal in the points race, before being a substitute. at the Paris Olympics.
For France, it is a gift from heaven.
“It’s a great pick,” underlines Henry. “When he became European U23 omnium champion, my youth colleague told me: there’s an Englishman, he stepped on us, it looked like Benjamin Thomas.”
In fact, the young Oscar shares a size and profile similar to that of the Olympic omnium champion this summer.
“When I saw him, I told him: you are actually a mini-me,” says Benjamin Thomas. “He still lacks a little experience and vice. But he will hurt,” adds the Tarnais, who is skipping the Worlds in Denmark.
“Ben is a role model for me,” replies Oscar. He also wants to combine the road and the track, where he would like to “make a podium” in the omnium on Saturday or in the American on Sunday with Clément Petit, in bronze on Thursday in the scratch.
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