At 19 years old, only four years after seriously starting to compete, Titouan Castryck won the silver medal in kayak slalom (K1) on Thursday 1st August in Vaires-sur-Marne: the Breton phenomenon is charging into the pools and learning (very) quickly.
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For his first Olympic Games, Castryck did not tremble and had almost a perfect performance: best time in the qualifications on Tuesday, third in the semi-final on Thursday afternoon, he probably let the Olympic title slip away in the final at gate 17, where he was tossed around by the current and lost a good two seconds (88.42).
He was only beaten by the Italian Giovanni de Gennaro (80.22). The podium was completed by the Spaniard Pau Echaniz (88.87), while the Briton Joseph Clarke, reigning world champion and best time in the semi-final, dropped to 5th place.
The Breton offered the French slalom team its second medal after Nicolas Gestin’s victory in canoeing (C1) and the French delegation its 27th medal since the start of the 2024 Olympic Games.
Born in Saint-Malo, Castryck is the son of a former French international kayak slalom athlete who competed in the 1992 and 1996 Olympic Games, and a slalom coach.
He discovered the discipline through sea kayaking, but was not interested in competition, he explained last June to AFP: it was only around the age of 15 that he “got into it” made good friends with whom we progressed together ” at the Cesson-Sévigné Flying Fish club, near Rennes, that he threw himself headlong into the discipline.
Second chance in kayak cross
Since then, almost nothing has stopped him. Not even his color blindness, which sometimes disrupts his perception of the gates, green to take in the direction of the river or red going up the river. Everything accelerated in 2022, with his titles of world and European champion of the under-18s.
The following year, he brought back a bronze medal from the Under-23 World Championships, before discovering the “real” World Championships, in the senior category, where he finished 14th in K1 and 28th in kayak cross, a huge disappointment which, he believes, compromises his qualification for the 2024 Olympics.
But two weeks later, he won the World Cup stage in Vaires-sur-Marne and secured his Olympic visa.
Castryck failed to emulate Benoit Peschier, the only Frenchman to win the Olympic kayak title exactly twenty years ago, in 2004.
Since slalom was definitively added to the Olympic programme in 1992, the French team, a world reference in the discipline, has won twenty medals.
Three years ago, she returned from Tokyo without any medals, a first in her history.
The French harvest may not be over and Castryck can contribute to it: he is entered alongside Boris Neveu, Camille Prigent and Angèle Hug in the new kayak cross event, a confrontational race inspired by BMX or skicross, scheduled from August 2 to 5.
Read also2024 Olympics: all the results of the events