Through observations, winks and anecdotes, the Carnets de Paris immerse you in the heart of the Olympic Games.
Virginie Chénier had been searching for the Eiffel Tower for two days without success. The archer from Laval finally found it when she arrived at the competition site where the first stage of the women’s individual archery event at the Paris Olympics took place on Thursday morning.
The spectacle was surreal. The high fences demarcating the competition site, but especially the restrictions imposed on the circulation of cars for security reasons, had completely stifled the usual urban noise. All that could be heard was the singing of birds and the repeated “tchit” of the 64 archers shooting their arrows in volleys at the targets placed 70 meters away from them.
The Eiffel Tower loomed just to their left, jutting out from behind a row of trees. If they looked up and looked a little beyond their targets, the athletes could see the glass and iron lacework of the domes of the Grand Palais. The highlight, however, was behind them, their stadium set up in front of the Hôtel des Invalides and its famous golden dome.
In archery, we are not used to performing in such places. “Normally, it’s in fields,” said Virginie Chénier at the end of her first day of competition. In addition, “the temperature was great,” meaning not too hot, not too sunny, not too windy.
Well. The contest was outrageously dominated by the Koreans, with one of them (Lim Si-hyeon) even setting a new world record, but that was no surprise. “This is Korea. This is the world power. They could send anyone in their top 30 and they would still be a good team.”
On Thursday, Virginie Chénier preferred to remember that she had just achieved her fifth performance of the season, which allowed her to start the competition in the middle of the pack.
She had already dreamed of the Olympic Games when she was a little girl and did gymnastics. When that path seemed blocked and she switched to archery, she chose the type of events that kept her Olympic dream alive. After narrowly missing out in Rio and Tokyo, here she is finally getting her Olympic dream “on the third try.”
In this context, we seek “to keep the same plan of attack”, but also “to enjoy being there, to look around and to notice everything that is happening”.
This report was financed with the support of the Transat International Journalism Fund-
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