The pentathlon is one of those disciplines that make up the DNA of the Olympic Games. For Élodie Clouvel, it is a trauma that is at the origin of everything.
Introduced in 1912, the pentathlon is one of the oldest events in the Olympic Games, but also one of the most confidential. It is directly inspired by what was the main event of the ancient Games, combining javelin throwing, discus throwing, jumping, wrestling and running. It is divided into five events that take place on the same day: fencing, swimming, horse riding, running and 10m shooting.
Long exclusively male, the modern pentathlon has had a women’s event since the Sydney Games in 2000. And a French woman is among the very best athletes in the world right now. Silver medalist in Rio in 2016 in the discipline, Élodie Clouvel qualified in Paris for her fourth Olympic Games this year, and will try to get a second medal this summer.
Yet Élodie Clouvel did not intend to do modern pentathlon. Until 2008, she was mainly a swimming specialist, and trained with Philippe Lucas to try to qualify for the Beijing Games. After narrowly missing out on qualifying, she was contacted by the modern pentathlon federation to join the team. And the reason that pushed her to accept is surprising.
As Élodie Clouvel told the magazine GQ in 2021 before the Tokyo Games, it was a fall from a horse when she was a child that pushed her to want to participate in this discipline which includes show jumping as an event. “The horse took off at full speed, galloping, at full speed. It was unmanageable. And so I was on it. We went into the stones, then we came to a big descent, the horse always has incredible energy, I couldn’t control it. I told myself that we were both going to fall so I jumped off the horse, without a helmet.”
What followed was a head trauma and, above all, a terrible fear of horses, until the pentathlon federation called me in. “I surprised myself! But maybe it was a way to get out of it, to start my story with horses again. It was hard. It took me five years to feel comfortable. At the London Olympics in 2012, it wasn’t like that. In Rio, in 2016, it was much better.”