On the eve of the French Elite Athletics Championships which take place this weekend in Angers, and one month before the Paris Olympic Gamesthe Savoyard Christophe Lemaitre announces this Thursday to our colleagues from Dauphiné Libéré a you Parisian put an end to his professional career, after a calf injury which did not allow him to qualify for the Olympics. “I’m stopping my professional and international career, I think it’s time to hang it up” he declares in the columns of Dauphiné. “I wanted to do everything to qualify for the Paris Games, which would have been a unique moment for me, unfortunately I did not succeed because of yet another injury (…) my body is no longer capable of put up with what I send him, that’s how it is.”
“My body is no longer able to handle what I throw at it”
The 34-year-old sprinter, four times European champion and double Olympic medalist, knew as early as May that he would not be able to participate in the Olympics. At the Athens meeting, “I suffered a grade 2 muscle injury in my calf during the warm-up, and between the recovery and re-athletics time, it would not have been possible to perform well, so we said stop”, he tells Le Parisien. First licensed at the Aix-les-Bains club, then Metz, the Savoyard has been training in Nantes since 2022. He told the Dauphiné that he did not have “too many regrets”. “The only one, perhaps, is not having left Aix-les-Bains earlier; I should have done it after the Tokyo Olympics for which I had not managed to qualify, and no in 2022.”
