The portrait
Article reserved for subscribers
The swimmer, who was deprived of an arm and a leg by a shark, won the bronze medal on Tuesday, September 3 at the Paris Paralympic Games. We met him in May.
We found it clearly in his positive, sunny and sharing reaction to his bronze medal: “I’m a little disappointed of course but in Tokyo, I came fourth, so just to bring home a medal, I’m happy, and then there are my friends, my family who came from Reunion, even guys from work,” said Laurent Chardard on Tuesday, September 3, after his 50m butterfly in the S6 category won by the Chinese Jingang Wang. We met him in May.
We expected it. Because the story of “I got eaten by a shark” can only be crazy, necessarily crazy. But still, this moment when Laurent Chardard returns to «l’accident» turns us over like a pancake. Sensitive and traumatized souls of Jaws refrain : “It was the summer of 2016, I was on vacation in Reunion, the waves were really beautiful that day. […] I went with a friend doing bodyboarding [surf pratiqué allongé sur la planche, ndlr] at Boucan Canot, where there are shark nets. The red flag was up. But we surfers don’t look at the flags, they’re for swimming. The bigger the waves, the happier we are… There, they were going over the nets and a shark must have gone through with them. The attack was super-fast. There were about twenty of us in the water, I was paddling towards the peak, where we’re going to wait for the wave, so out to sea, and at one point when I had my right arm in the water, something
