Pierre-Ambroise Bosse, 800 meter world champion in 2017, announces his retirement

The 800 meters specialist announced on Tuesday the end of his career at the age of 31. A decision forced by a body battered by injuries.

“I want to go to the Games, but I know my body won’t let me, it’s actually over!” It is with these words spoken for The Team, Tuesday December 26, that Pierre-Ambroise Bosse announced the end of his career. After more than ten years at the international level, the 800-meter specialist, world distance champion in London in 2017 and two-time bronze medalist at the European Championships, decided to turn the page just seven months before the opening ceremony of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games.

In question, a recent recurrence on his tendon of the insertion of the right hamstring, one year after an operation on this same tendon which has tortured him since “almost ten years”. “I no longer enjoy athleticshe says. There’s something unhealthy in this tendon, it’s no longer in the game. The days pass, the Games arrive and at this rate, I will never be there.” Pierre-Ambroise Bosse will not participate in his fourth Olympic Games.

A year 2017 of (very) ups and downs

However, it was at the Rio de Janeiro Olympics in 2016 that the native of Nantes truly entered the highest international ranks with a fourth place. The current holder of the French 800 meters record (1’42”53, mark established in 2014 in Monaco) thus validated his progress after a fifth place at the World Championships in Beijing the previous year, before his career reached its climax the following season.

In 2017, at the Olympic Stadium in London, Pierre-Ambroise Bosse attacked 250 meters from the finish in the final of the world championships. A frank offensive under the noses of the main favorites that he will leave in his rearview mirror to become the first and still the only Frenchman, men and women combined, world champion in the 800 meters. To measure performance: only Kevin Mayer (decathlon, 2017 and 2022) and Yohan Diniz (50 km walk, 2017) have since climbed to the highest step of a world podium.

A few minutes later, he imitated Nelson Montfort on the latter’s microphone, who asked him about the feat of his career. Like, ultimately, the character he embodies in each public appearance: a man who has long made viewers laugh after his races when he spoke, in particular, of his cat, in sometimes lunar, often disjointed speeches.

“I didn’t want to waste my youth”

He celebrated this title on his return to Gare du Nord, in Paris, with his supporters whom he had invited on X (formerly Twitter) for a drink. Upon his arrival, “PAB” had bought numerous rounds of beers for those who had honored the appointment.

Proof that he didn’t have the best lifestyle, but he never hid that. “It’s part of my personality. I’m like that and I think that’s why I was world championhe explains to L’Equipe. I played the honesty card. I didn’t want to waste my youth either, even if I had big sporting ambitions.”

This will have played tricks on him since he was sentenced by the Bordeaux criminal court, in 2019, to a fine of 1,000 euros for “violence with use or threat of a weapon without incapacity” for acts that occurred at the end of August 2017. Pierre-Ambroise Bosse explained that he had been slapped in the parking lot of the Gujan-Mestras casino, in his car, by an amateur rugby player. The athlete admitted to getting out of the car to explain himself and throwing a can of beer which had hit his attacker.

“I’m a little in mourning”

Since the year 2017, full of ups and downs, the student from Lille Alain Lignier has never found the heights of a career also marked by five national titles. Despite, all the same, the bronze at the 2018 European Championships. He then multiplied the injuries: first a fracture of the toe then a disinsertion of this famous tendon of the right hamstring. “My tendon is 100 years old! I wouldn’t wish my worst enemy to have an up and down career like that. I can do almost everything, but as soon as I have to go quickly, it gets stuck.”he regrets in The Team.

He then withdrew from the World Championships in Eugene and the European Championships in Munich, in the summer of 2022, before deciding to have an operation at the end of the year. Absent again in Budapest during the last world championships, last August, due to a recurrence of the tendon which occurred in May, Pierre-Ambroise Bosse said “stop”. “That was difficult, I needed time to admit ithe admits. Since the MRI, it’s complicated, I’m a little in mourning. I spent days in my bed. I didn’t go out anymore, I didn’t do sports anymore, I must not have been good looking.” He was on the track during his best seasons.