A final crazy lap and an unreal final straight, run in a deafening atmosphere thanks to the Stade de France crowd. On Saturday, August 31, in the Saint-Denis sports arena (Seine-Saint-Denis), Antoine Praud overtook his competitors one by one to snatch third place in the 1,500 m, T46 category (people with muscular deficiency in the upper limbs). On the second day of the athletics events at the 2024 Paralympic Games, the 20-year-old Breton thus brought the first medal to the French team.
« [C’était] a crazy race. Better than in my dreams. The second is really not farhe explains. When I saw that it was going really fast, I told myself that I had to grit my teeth. My opponents cracked in the last lap, but not me. “With this crowd, I couldn’t crackadds Antoine Praud. He was the one who gave me the strength in the last hundred meters to go for that third place. My ears were ringing in the final straight.”
Until then, this engineering student had never run in front of such a large crowd: “About 4,000 people” during the international disabled sports meeting in Paris in June, “maybe a little more” at the 2023 World Championships, also in Paris, he remembers. The day before, his teammate Valentin Bertrand had warned him after competing in his 100m. “He told me: ‘You’re going to see the crazy noise when you enter the track.’ I enjoyed haranguing the crowd to take this positive energy.”he explained.
Personal record improved by four seconds
Present in the crowd, Olympic athlete Léna Kandissounon (800m) admires the one with whom she shares training at Haute Bretagne Athlétisme, a club based in Ille-et-Vilaine: “It was his best race tactically. He really used the crowd for his last 300 meters. He had the race of his life at the right time.”
Like sprinter Marie Ngoussou, the youngest member of the French delegation at 15, the middle-distance runner was dragged by the arm during a difficult birth. He has since suffered from paralysis of the right brachial plexus, which causes him to lose his balance when running, including swinging his arm from right to left and blocking when accelerating.
To secure the bronze medal, the rider improved his personal best by four seconds, to 3:51.37, finishing behind Australian Michael Roeger and Russian (running under the neutral banner) Aleksandr Iaremchuk. In one year, he lowered his record by more than ten seconds, going from 4:03.90 to 3:55.39 at the end of May.
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