Cyril Jonard returns to the top of Olympus twenty years later

And Cyril Jonard set the Arena Champ de Mars on fire! At 48 years old, the Limoges native electrified, overwhelmed and got the entire audience going, celebrating his bronze medal with an improvised Macarena. “He felt the vibrations in the room, because it’s rare that he communicates like that with the audience,” confided his coach and friend, Jason Guillot. Twenty years after his Paralympic victory in Athens, sixteen years after his silver medal in Beijing, the judoka completes his collection, and completes it, in Paris by taking third place against the Uzbek Turgun Abdiev, on whom he inflicted an ippon by immobilization after one minute and forty seconds of combat. A small personal masterpiece.

The day of the Frenchman, who suffers from Usher syndrome – a rare genetic disease that made him deaf from birth before gradually causing him to lose his sight – had started perfectly with his success in the first round against the Iraqi Taha Al-Gburi, already with a magnificent ippon. Then in the quarter-finals, the judoka from Limoges had gotten the better of the Moldovan Oleg Cretul, with difficulty, with a precious waza-ari. In the semi-finals, however, the English step represented by Daniel Powell proved too high, the latter winning in turn with a waza-ari, after a terrible golden score of almost four minutes which already set the Parisian arena alight.

After such a defeat, it is not easy for an athlete to remobilize. But after having overcome so many challenges, and after having won so much on all the sieves of the world (13 world titles), Cyril Jonard could not stop there. Without offering a wonderful happy ending to the public of the Arena Champ-de-Mars, and celebrating this with Jason Guillot, with whom he communicates by “signing” in the palm of the judoka’s hand: a unique method that they have recently implemented and which allows them to tell each other everything, or almost.

Even before the competition, he had come back from even further, after suffering from three herniated discs that caused him to miss London and then to line up out of form in Rio. He had not been selected for the Tokyo Games. But the judoka has relaunched himself, notably with the creation of the J1 category after the 2021 edition. This Saturday, the Limoges native, in addition to a Paralympic bronze medal, the second for French judo at these Games after that of Sandrine Martinet on Thursday, also won the public grand prize hands down.

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