800m specialist Gabriel Tual is one of the real chances of medals for the French team in Paris.
This is one of the real chances for a medal on the French side for the Paris Games this summer. European champion last June, Gabriel Tual is a specialist in the 800m. The first Frenchman to win the 800m title at the European Championships, he became the French record holder for the distance on July 7, just five hundredths of a second off the world’s best performance of the year.
Gabriel Tual is 26 years old. He turned professional in the 2018 season, participating in his first European Championships in Berlin. He was also part of the French Olympic team at the Tokyo Games, and finished seventh in the final.
But it was really this year 2024 that Gabriel Tual exploded onto the world athletics scene. Already in June, he became the first French European champion in the 800m in Rome. In the process, he broke his personal record by becoming French champion in 1’43″99. On July 7, he achieved his reference race, two weeks before the start of the Olympic Games. In a crazy race at the Paris meeting where all the competitors beat their personal records, he completed the double lap of the track in 1’41″61, beating Pierre-Ambroise Bosse’s French record by almost a second, five hundredths of a second off the best world performance of the year.
Gabriel Tual started athletics in Agen, before joining US Talence in sports studies at high school. Although he does not come from a family of professional athletes, physical activity has always been part of his daily life. “We have always done sports as a family, running, cycling, swimming, surfing, mountain biking and hiking,” says the Frenchman at the University of Bordeaux where he is following a special course. “My father was a specialist in the 800 meters. After trying football, I ended up following in his footsteps.”
Followed by the French athletics team since his debut, Gabriel Tual surprised on July 7 even the former French 800m record holder, the 2017 world champion Pierre-Ambroise Bosse. The latter told the newspaper The Team that he had been “shocked” by Gabriel Tual’s time. “Normally, records are broken hundredth by hundredth. Even he doesn’t understand, there is no logic.”
With this performance a few days before the Games, Gabriel Tual arrives in Paris with increased confidence, and is certainly one of the contenders for the gold medal.