the essential
The Tarn Olympic champion and his family wanted to share the exceptional 2024 campaign with their friends and supporters, this Wednesday, November 27. A warm evening at the Halle d’Occitanie in Lavaur.
The infinite riches of the land of Cocagne were just waiting for him. Olympic gold. And he is there, in this almost ordinary box, on the stage of the Halle d’Occitanie where Benjamin Thomas invited all his friends to celebrate in all simplicity his immense happiness of summer.
Before the creation of this room, every first weekend of September, people everywhere came to applaud the stars on this place in Tarn. Brel, Trenet, Sardou, Vartan, Luis Mariano, Fugain, Joe Dassin and even Mike Brant filled up but this Wednesday evening, it is a child from here, from Lavaur, who enters the light. The day before, the multiple champion of France, Europe, the world and now double medalist at the Olympics received the city’s medal from the hands of Bernard Carayon; this Thursday he is expected in the “capital”, Albi, to be honored by the department (the Legion of Honor and the Elysée, it’s been done for two months!), but this home party is undoubtedly the most strong on the emotion scale.
A father’s tears
Michèle, his mother, runs a lot and goes to great lengths to ensure that a schedule is respected so as not to be respected. Her father, Gérard, will break down on the microphone, mentioning the presence of aunt Arlette, Arlette Baldy, a great lady of tennis who is very ill but has come from her Lot valley to participate in the meeting.
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“Ben’s” eyes will also mist up when he sees himself sliding violently on the sacred parquet floor of Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines and leaving to seek, in pursuit of history, the charm of a lifetime. And the audience will applaud, like this summer, the feat awaited from Tokyo by the French runner (“there, they put gold around my neck before the start of the race!”). Blue jacket, white shirt, with a little “Cofidis red” bow tie, Benjamin would have been perfectly in tune with this August 8, 2024 when his bib number 27 transformed into number 1 for eternity.
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“There were a lot of highlights that day, I was told that some people broke the TV when it fell! I knew the regulations, the rule of five neutralization laps, I didn’t panic. Then, there was the victory but it was in the room where we met before the protocol ceremony that I began to realize, I replayed my whole life, the good and bad moments of my career. I cried, and I cried again on the podium with the medal.” We would like these tears to never dry up.
The happy hero
Adrien, his big brother alongside whom he did all his apprenticeship, also came to Valentin Longuemare’s microphone to tell “his” Ben, the one he could have accompanied to the sky of the velodromes without a cursed iliac artery… With the messages video of the essentials Morgan Kneisky and Donavan Grondin, other relatives relayed “Benji” before the drawing of the raffle which he himself orchestrated. Cyrille Tronche, the technician, Gilles Girardot the president of the newly re-elected committee and the indispensable Anthony Perez, arrived “right on time” with little Elina in his arms, to say that he is responsible for taking care of Benjamin on the races because he is angry with his alarm clock!
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Champions, sometimes, are much more endearing on the field, the ring, the road or the floor of their discipline than in the city. Benjamin Thomas is one of the happy heroes that we are as delighted to meet in competition as in private. With or without a bike, the sincerity of his smile, tinged with rainbow and, now, dazzling golden highlights, never fades.
“The Italian” comes home
Former mayor of Lavaur, our colleague Jacques Esparbié bends down to show Benjamin how tall he was when he knew him… Obviously, he was very small. Ben smiles and his evening will be punctuated by a crowd of meetings with known friends or unknown cousins, kids or grandmas, old traveling companions too, all admiring and telling him how much fun they had this been in front of their screen or, for the luckiest, on site in the heart of the Saint-Quentin cauldron.
At the heart of the images projected at the Halle d’Occitanie, the Vauréen’s little masterpiece, not on August 8 but on June 8 in the streets of Lucca, on the Giro during his first stage success on a Grand Tour (it would have or been in Carcassonne but…) As the master tactician that he definitely is, he played against the Italians Paleni and Pietrobon, and the formidable Danish Valgren. Lucca, almost at home at the time since he had been living in Lombardy for several years with Martina Alzini, but the Cofidis rider has just moved. He is now a resident of Lavaur again and if you drive in the area, you may have the opportunity to come across him soon on a road in Tarn or Haute-Garonne. Last night he also confirmed that he would continue to ride on the track! “I managed to combine the two and it hasn’t gone too bad so far, I still want to ride on the track, it’s in my DNA…”
