Simply unheard of. If the 25km in open water is commonly ranked in the category of the most demanding events, the situation that swimmers experienced on Saturday, during the European Swimming Championships in Rome, is akin to heartbreak for them. .
Leaving for more than five hours of intense effort in a sea where the waves dictated the race, some athletes were suddenly stopped after three hours of swimming by the race management, while the three Italians in the lead joined the arrived without anyone knowing and when the race was officially far from over. In reality, the most probable hypothesis is that only the Italians were warned of the shortening of the race.
In the fight for the podium throughout the race, Axel Reymond, world champion 2019, stopped at the microphone of France Télévisions to depict this grotesque situation. “I was on the 11th lap, a scooter (of the seas) is placed in front of me and tells me ‘stop, the race is over’. I was fine, I was starting to catch up with people and suddenly I didn’t see anyone and they just told me to stop, ”says the French swimmer.
In the general confusion, all the participants who had not reached the finish by mistake were repatriated one by one by the officials’ jet skis on the beach. There followed a general misunderstanding of the athletes who tried to clarify this situation. At first glance, the race would have been stopped due to rough seas, but no official reason has yet been mentioned.
No information provided
Also questioned about this event, the tricolor DTN Julien Iboussié remained circumspect: “We did not have any information. During the technical meeting, they said that if the race had to be stopped, they would have warned one lap before. In recent history, we have never had that. When we had to stop racing, we knew it before. We are a little surprised. »
In this discipline, stopping a race is not unusual. What is much more is that no team has been warned before. The judges have the habit of warning one lap in advance if the decision to cut the effort of the swimmers has been taken. However, according to Axel Reymond, no information has reached him: “We (the French team, editor’s note) only had one boat offshore, we take information every turn, and the last information that I I had was that there were five rounds left. »
So what happens in the event of an impromptu shutdown? The swimmer explains: “Normally, when more than 15km of racing have been covered, there is an official classification. It’s a big mess because nobody knew about it and it happened between the judges apparently. “If this were the case, the French would not appear on the podium of the event.