HEAD TO HEAD Christophe Lemaitre - Sprinter
NOT YOUR
ou took up sprinting relatively late (aged 15). Have you been surprised by your rapid progress?
It’s true, I suppose I did
come into athletics pretty late, relatively speaking that is. From that point, everything went very quickly and three years after I started I became Junior World Champion in the 200m in Poland, which was defi nitely a great moment for me early on in my career. I improved very quickly. It was no surprise because Pierrot (Carraz, his coach) always asserted that I could do it and constantly believed in me. The faster you run, the harder it is to improve by hundredths of seconds but I keep in mind that athletics is the school of patience. I remain consistent and build my career on a long term perspective.
Your comments after the Olympic 200m fi nal suggest you felt you could have done better? Was a medal your target? Unfortunately, my 200m in the Olympics remains a painful memory. In the fi nal, even if I did not have the best lane, I believed I could make it. In terms of losing out on a medal, that happened in the semi-fi nal when I didn’t manage to secure a better lane. I still think that with a better lane, I would have been able to get the bronze. But we all learn from our own mistakes.
Have you done anything differently this winter in order to take on the Jamaicans and Americans? This winter we focused on aerobic work
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RUN OF THE MILL
The sight of the relatively slender, white fi gure of Christophe Lemaitre in a 100m fi nal is now commonplace. The fi rst person of European descent to break the 10-second barrier is the fastest man in Europe, but it is the international stages of the World Championships and Olympics where he wants to make his mark. With the World Championships in August, the current European champion at 100m, 200m and 4x100m speaks to ActivInstinct.
and weight training. It is an absolute must to have a solid aerobic basis, which will then hold throughout the season, and then I can be in very good shape for Moscow (at the IAAF World Championships in August of this year). We’ll judge the success or the failure of the season in August. There was no specifi c preparation; it’s been years that we have worked this way with Pierrot, even if the strength training brings something new.
Do you train in France all year round? Or do you move around? Most of time I train in France, in Aix- les-Bains – everything we need for hard training is all here so there is no real need to move about too much. On the other hand, it doesn’t mean that we don’t sometimes travel abroad for training camps. Using training camps in other countries allows us to take advantage of weather conditions, as in Portugal this winter, or to benefi t from special experiences such as last April with the Penn Relay.
Sprinters don’t peak until their mid-twenties. Do you still think you can improve? It’s true, but there are the odd exceptions to the rule, take Darrel Brown for example, he set the World Junior record with a 10.01seconds, which is an incredible performance, even though he improved his best by only two hundredths of a second. Everything depends on the career plan you decide to follow, so my own personal one is based on long term perspective: I am currently improving and will be faster for Rio. I’ll be 26 years old then, that doesn’t sounds too old, does it?
Sounds good to us! You do little weight training - what do you do to supplement this? In weight training, I’ve started from scratch. Last winter we focused on developing dynamic power on the top of my body as well as on the lower parts. I’m currently training to strengthen the muscles of my shoulders, so that means doing more bench presses and things like that. I’m using heavier weights than I used to use three years ago! But, as you know, weight training results aren’t going to appear immediately, only in the long term.
Do you have any plans to move up in distance to 400m? This is actually the fi rst time I have been asked this question, and to be honest I’ve never thought about it! The 400m is totally different from 100m
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