French hat-trick in BMX Racing, Joris Daudet Olympic champion

French hat trick in BMX Racing Joris Daudet Olympic champion

France achieved a historic triple in BMX Racing at the Paris Olympics with the victory of Joris Daudet ahead of Sylvain André and Romain Mahieu, on August 2, 2024 in Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines. All sports combined, you have to go back to 1924, a hundred years ago in Paris, to find traces of such a French triple at the Summer Games. This is the eleventh gold medal in these Olympic Games for France, already one more than in the entire Tokyo Olympics in 2021.

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The French had already achieved this in skicross at the Winter Olympics in 2014. This historic triple in BMX Racing brings France its eleventh gold medal in these 2024 Olympic Games, one more than in the entire Tokyo Olympics in 2021. No nation had ever achieved the triple at the Games since the introduction of BMX Racing in Beijing in 2008.

While France has dominated BMX for years, it had never won a single Olympic medal in the men’s category and none in the women’s category since Anne-Caroline Chausson and Laëtitia Le Corguillé won a double in Beijing in 2008. In a highly charged atmosphere, the Blues put an end to this incredible curse to erase the trauma of Tokyo where the same three riders were already in the final for zero medals at the end.

It is also a personal consecration for Joris Daudet, 33, triple world champion and BMX legend. A year ago, almost to the day, France had already signed a historic triple at the World Championships in Glasgow, only achieved by the Americans more than twenty-five years ago.

In the World Cup, the French have won 17 of the last 31 rounds in the last four years, a colossal total. Behind the three selected for Paris, other riders such as Arthur Pilard, European champion and 2023 world vice-champion, or Jérémy Rencurel have contributed to an unrivaled harvest in this sport. In Saint-Quentin, they dominated the competition by winning all the quarter-final and semi-final rounds between them before blowing away the competition once again in the final.

Read alsoFollow the 2024 Olympic Games on RFI

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