Renaud Lavillenie succeeded essentially in Liévin on Sunday by winning an 8th title of French indoor champion in the pole vault but did not manage to really take off (5.80 m). A week after crossing 5.94 m on his Clermont land, the Olympic champion (2012) was not in exceptional shape. But what does it matter since only the gold medal mattered to him when disembarking in Pas-de-Calais and the mission was in this respect perfectly fulfilled. Lavillenie thus adds one more reward to its rich collection: with the nine crowns won in the open air, the Clérmontois is now 17 nationally. Impressive.
Passionate about statistics, Lavillenie did not fail to point out that he had just completed a 150th competition at 5.80 m or more. Admittedly, it does not go as high as it did during its splendor and it has not erased a bar at 6 m since 2016, but it still remains remarkably regular at the highest level.
Despite the weight of the years and the emergence of the Swedish prodigy Armand Duplantis, who stole his world record in February (by successively crossing 6.17 m then 6.18 m one week apart), Lavillenie is still doing resistance and will still be a serious customer for a podium this year at the Tokyo Olympics or at the Euro in Paris. “The first objective was to recover from the All Star Perche, I left a lot of energy there. My Thursday session was thus zero, I did not even manage to beat my training colleagues. I had no juice and I was not in it. But I knew that competition would be something else. We had to fight a little. I'm happy to end on a good note like this. I will be able to project myself on the summer, "declared the Frenchman, crowned in front of his younger brother Valentin (5.70 m) and Alioune Sene (5.60 m).
"It is encouraging and I prefer to end the indoor season on a good dynamic"
Renaud LavillenieLavillenie is well aware that he can no longer "dream too much" of bars over 6 m "regularly", unlike the phenomenal Duplantis, but he is still happy to have shown himself to be "capable" again this winter to be in a fight with the best, after a nightmarish 2019 year marked by his elimination in qualifying for the Doha Worlds. “It is encouraging and I prefer to end the indoor season on a good dynamic. I will be able to go quietly on vacation, put the body back on the road for this summer and not hurry too much because the base is pretty good, ”he said.
Besides Lavillenie, there were two other international stars on the program in Liévin, but they had mixed fortunes. The Olympic heptathlon champion, Belgian Nafissatou Thiam, invited to the length, did not make the short trip for nothing, breaking the national indoor record (6.79 m). The Burkinabe Hugues Fabrice Zango had won the African record for the improved triple jump on February 2 in Paris (17.77 m). But the member of the Artois Athletics club, protected by Teddy Tamgho, had to be satisfied with a success without too much relief (17.29 m).
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