On Friday evening, French para-swimming won two additional medals.
“That’s the advantage of breaststroke, where your head is submerged during each movement, you can hear everything and it’s really invigorating.”Hector Denayer rejoiced on Friday morning, after the 100m breaststroke heats in the SB9 category. The 19-year-old Alsatian, who has been training for two years at the Alliance Dijon Natation performance access center, had set a promising third time. The public obviously did it again at 7:14 p.m., when he entered the Arena. «Hector ! Hector !» took to the stands like wildfire. And Denayer, who has agnesia in his left hand (he is missing all five fingers), kept his promise: he took silver behind the big favourite, the Italian Stefano Raimondi, who had played him piano in series. Needless to say, the outcry was XXL.
“I need to be pushed to succeed”
On the rise, double silver medallist this year at the European Championships, Denayer is also involved in the 50m freestyle (Monday), the 200m medley (Thursday) and the 100m butterfly (Friday), and in the team for the 4x100m medley relay (Monday). A program that attests to a great hunger. Spicy, when you learn by South West that the interested party these days peroxide does not like swimming and urges his coach, Ramzi Mekhmoukh, to put pressure on him, explaining: “I’m a wanker, I need to be pushed to succeed.” The coach suggests a real joker: “At the beginning of the year, I didn’t yell too much, I let him do it. After an average competition, when I asked him what was wrong, he said to me: ‘You have to become mean’. So I am mean to him. And he needs it. Since he has a very tough character, he needs to understand that if he doesn’t do what is expected of him, he will end up leaving.” Hot !
As he left the pool, in the mixed zone, the strong head deciphered his race: “I’m obviously a little disappointed because, I’m not going to hide it, I wanted gold, but the best time [en faisant 1 minute 05 secondes et 91 centièmes, il bat le record de France ndlr]final of the Games, and then the season was long, hard, so today is just a bonus and I will savor this medal.” And Hector Denayer added, as a fan of Viking mythology: “My coach told me ‘’You have to be Ragnar tonight‘’was I a Ragnar?, people can judge, but I think I was a warrior, I was there to fight and I did it.”
Half an hour later, Alex Portal pocketed his second medal of the 2024 Paralympic Games: bronze, in the 100m backstroke in the S13 category – that of swimmers suffering from severe visual impairment, his being due to ocular albinism, a genetic disease. A specialist in the butterfly and crawl, the champion from Saint-Germain-en-Laye still has two events left to fill his bag. A godsend, for someone who laughs at being nicknamed «le bigleux» – Ugo Didier, his roommate during these Paralympics, has the right to “without calves”With the gold that the latter won on Thursday evening, in the 400m freestyle, French para-swimming already has four medals since the start of the Games.
Disappointments
The scenario was less “feel good” for David Smétanine and Dimitri Granjux. The former still has two races on his Paralympic program, but the disappointment must have been significant for Smétanine, 49, a pillar of French para-swimming, laden with medals, who did not manage to qualify this Friday for the final of the 100m freestyle in the S4 category. Before the Games, the para-swimmer, partially quadriplegic following a car accident, had stressed that “Qualifying was difficult”implying that the path to the medal would be complicated. That said, his desire to “closing the loop” of his career in beauty “at home”and his dizzying list of achievements (nine Paralympic medals including two gold, a plethora of European and world titles, 157 national titles, etc.) allow us to envisage a successful return to form.
Dimitri Granjux experienced the same setback in the 100m freestyle, but the Haute-Savoie native (handicapped by congenital neuropathy) is 18 years old. He took it philosophically: “It didn’t go through to the final, but I expected it… It’s a first race to get me into the swing of things. I’ll have my cards to play for the next ones.”
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Updated at 9:30 a.m., August 31: added Hector Denayer’s statement upon leaving the pool.
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