It is an activity that some practice to relax. Almost everyone has already played it, but few in the spirit of competition. This Thursday, June 23 marks the start of the World Puzzle Championships in Valladolid, Spain. Three categories are on the program: team, duo and individual. Regarding the last mentioned, the best player in the world is French.
Sophie de Goncourt, 53 years old and medical delegate in the Sarthe on a daily basis, is triple world champion in individual puzzle, a status which she assumes with pleasure. ‘It’s fun, I like that side’Cons dinner. That is to say that I have a passion that has no interest and that makes people laugh a lot.”
For me, doing a puzzle is like reading. There is always a puzzle started at home, I do it every day rather than watching TV.
Sophie de Goncourt, world puzzle championat franceinfo
This crazy puzzler has been doing it every day since she was little. At home, you can find more than a thousand boxes and their millions of small parts that she assembles one after the other: “Before the competitions, I trainshe continues. We know on which brand, which publisher the competitions will take place, I take out the brand accordingly and I start to train a little.” A hobby that she uses, most of the time, to relax, she reassures.
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To win the world crown, of course, you need an effective method: aim to place a piece every eight seconds to hope to be the first to finish a puzzle of 500 pieces. “We always end with the frame. The priority to make a puzzle quickly is to sort it. We sort the colors as much as possibleshe explains, showing the pieces she handles. In this puzzle, which is very colorful, the owls all have a little colored apron. We’re going to sort them by decks, to have as many little piles of parts as possible, and then we put them together.”
The Sarthoise also holds a world duet title, as well as a world record in the category, both won with her husband, Patrice de Goncourt. The two assembly enthusiasts also met at the French puzzle championships in the 90s. “He was a formidable opponent. ! It was competitions in pairs at the time, the girls had won, I played with my little brother. The only way to beat her was to put myself with her”smiled her husband.
Like her, he ended up taking a liking to competition and its atmosphere. “What is impressive is the silence before the starting signal. You hear the sound of plastics, coins, boxes flying and after another silence, and then just the sound of coins rolling in the boxes. “
Thanks to her status as the best unifier in the world, Sophie was also able to see the doors of the cinema open. She thus has her name in the credits of a handful of films and in particular in First name, with Patrick Bruel and Valérie Benguigui. For the set of the film, she had to make a puzzle of 9000 pieces.