Paris 2024: they have qualified for the Olympics but may be deprived of it, the heartbreaker of the Olympic selections
“I’m not going to lie, I’m not sure I’ll be at the Games”. Less than five months before the opening of the Paris 2024 Olympics, Sébastien Guerrero is waiting. The shooter, an Olympic pit specialist, unlocked a quota for France in his discipline thanks to his bronze medal at the last European Championships.
But it is not yet certain that the Olympic ticket will come to him. This is a non-nominative quota, distributed in shooting as in other sports, and which is allocated by the federations to its athletes according to more or less established criteria.
Taekwondoist, Mickaël Borot remembers a “terrible disillusionment”. In 2008, when he won the world Olympic qualifying tournament, which offered a place for the Beijing Olympics to the French federation, it was his rival Pascal Gentil who was selected.
“Four years earlier, for Athens, it was Pascal who qualified our category, and it was not nominative. I beat him in a fight just before the selection, 11 to 7, the score is still engraved in my memory. I was the fit man, but I hadn’t been chosen, he says. So in 2008, when I brought back the quota and, again, we chose Pascal, I took it very hard, I thought about ending my career”.
Emma Vuitton, a kayaker who still hopes to participate in the Paris 2024 Olympics, experienced the same disappointment, but with calmer competition within the France group. With her 14th place at the 2023 Worlds, she obtained an Olympic quota in kayak slalom but was not selected in favor of Camille Prigent, who was missed that day (29th), but whom she will encourage at the edge of the pools this summer.
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