Paris (AFP)

The Burkinabe Hugues-Fabrice Zango achieved a huge feat on Saturday in Aubière by smashing the world record for the triple indoor jump (18.07 m) which belonged to his trainer, the French Teddy Tamgho (17.92) m.

It was in the anonymity of a small meeting held behind closed doors in the suburbs of Clermont-Ferrand that Zango made his jump but the performance was none the less spectacular.

The 27-year-old Burkinabé thus becomes the first man to exceed 18 m indoors by erasing Tamgho whose record had been held since 2011 and at the same time exploded his best personal mark achieved in January 2020 (17.77 m).

Everything happened like a dream for the native of Koudougou.

After leaping to 17.33m (2nd try), 17.61m (4th try) and 17.70m (5th try), he waited for his last attempt to make history, giving his country a first world record in athletics.

Zango, bronze medalist at the Doha Worlds behind the Americans Christian Taylor and Will Claye in 2019 with an African record (17.66 m), thus confirms his place among the leaders of the discipline and strikes a very big blow to seven months of the Tokyo Olympics.

"To see myself placed above the big names who have inspired me, and to cross the 18m mark, it's just exceptional," he told AFP.

"I go from a simple medalist to claiming a gold medal, I change rank. There is a lot of satisfaction because it proves that the work pays. I felt in training that I could do things but I had to to be able to do it in competition. To have done it is just incredible and on the last try, I'm all the more proud of it. "

- PhD student -

"It was my first competition of the year and I had difficulties with my run-up, I arrived too tense on the board, I could not deploy myself", he also explained .

"But my coach told me to keep running and I let go on that last jump."

Suddenly, Zango switched to another dimension, to the delight of his N.1 fan, Teddy Tamgho.

“When the student overtakes his master,” tweeted the 2013 world champion, who fell into his foal's arms when the result was announced.

"We already knew that the record had to fall. Now we are back to work because we must not stop there."

Spotted late at 18 in his country and arrived in France in 2015 with a student visa, Zango, member of Artois Athlétisme, leads his career as a high-level athlete and his studies at the university in Béthune perfectly. , near Lille, where he is preparing a thesis in electrical engineering.

Integrated into the structure of Teddy Tamgho in July 2018, he has since experienced spectacular progress and his results really took off from 2019. Very ambitious, he told AFP in September that he came to athletics "by chance "while nurturing a" big dream ":" To bring the triple jump to another planet. "

The outdoor world record of Briton Jonathan Edwards (18.29 m), who has held up since 1995, however seems difficult to achieve for the moment.

© 2021 AFP