2023-08-05 09:31:51
The 33-year-old climber won on Friday August 4 in Bern, Switzerland, giving the French team its very first gold medal at the World Championships. A good omen one year from the Paris Olympics.
At the peak of his discipline, by the force of his fingers (and everything else). Friday August 4, in Bern, Mickaël Mawem became the first Frenchman to become world champion in bouldering. The Haut-Rhin climber, who celebrated his 33rd birthday the day before the coronation, won by validating three blocks out of four in the Swiss capital.
“At 15, I said to myself “I want to be the best in the world one day and there, I have it”… I think that even I would not have bet on me, reacts the athlete, quoted by The team. There I realized something huge that takes up all the space in my whole body, I just want to keep it a little, because it feels good. The 2019 European champion now dreams of qualifying for the Paris 2024 Olympics, when he came close to a medal in Tokyo in 2021.
Tricolor lined
Of the Olympiads he had played with his older brother Bassa, with whom he discovered climbing as a teenager, in Huningue (Haut-Rhin), as recalled France Blue. The brothers, who grew up in Colmar, then joined the Alpi360 club in Village-Neuf, in the same Alsatian department.
At the World Championships in Bern, the French team not only won its first gold medal in bouldering: it scored twice by sending Mejdi Schalck, the 19-year-old French champion, to the second step of the podium. “I don’t really realize, getting this medal behind Mickaël (Mawem), frankly, it’s as if I had won, said the young climber after the final. Since I was little, I have dreamed of competitions. I’ve always been in awe of that, to be there so young, it’s unbelievable.”
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