Tokyo Olympics: Hugues Fabrice Zango wants to become the master stallion of the triple jump
Burkinabe athlete Hugues Fabrice Zango during the triple jump final at the Doha World Championships, September 29, 2019. AFP - ANDREJ ISAKOVIC
Text by: Christophe Jousset Follow
5 mins
Son of a financial inspector and a teacher, Hugues Fabrice Zango did not imagine having a sports career.
The Burkinabè will however be a very serious contender for the Olympic gold medal in the triple jump on August 5 in Tokyo.
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To be Olympic champion is not a dream for Hugues Fabrice Zango, it is a project. And he already knows how he will achieve it on August 5, the day of the triple jump final. “
The objective is very clearly to knock out the competition on the first try
,” he asks calmly.
After that, I won't be seen anymore, the Games will stop after the first try. Nothing interests me other than Olympic gold so I'm preparing for that. By nature, I let go when I have a knife to my throat, I turn, I look for solutions and it is not necessarily in accordance with the action. In the Olympic final, you have to take action and not think. The action is knocking everyone out on the first try. And then laugh at the other five.
"
Zango hasn't always made his ambitions so clear. But since his bronze medal at the last world championships, he has made further progress. To the point of becoming the first jumper in history to fall beyond 18 meters indoors. That day, last January, he broke the world record set ten years earlier by Frenchman Teddy Tamgho. Tamgho did not suffer from it, especially since for two and a half years he has been Zango's trainer. In his group of athletes, the powerful Burkinabè - 1m80 for 80 kilos - has earned a nickname. “
We call him Jiren
,” explains the 2013 world champion.
Like the character of Dragon Ball, the greatest manga in history, who is both calm and absolute strength.
This is how we see Hugues.
A person who will not necessarily speak but who will release a lot of power.
Like this character, he is very bulky, very strong, and his goal is precision, absolute strength, victory.
"
Zango would therefore be a character in search of gold in the land of manga.
And yet, to be Olympic champion, it was not a dream for the child that he was in Burkina Faso.
“
Of course when I was younger, maybe it was going to NASA that interested me
,” laughs the Triple Jump Stallion.
I was much more passionate about science than anything else.
My school grades proved it.
"
"Born of an ego"
Until this day of 2011 when an inter-college tournament led him to discover the Stade du 4-August in Ouagadougou.
A duel over 60 meters.
And a defeat that turns into a click.
“
If I hadn't been beaten in this competition,” he
analyzes, “
I'm sure I wouldn't be an athlete.
I asked myself, “But how could he beat me?
”
It haunts me until today because I couldn't get my revenge with this person that maybe I could beat now.
So yes, it was born of an ego.
"
Zango's ego drove him to break into sports. Without renouncing his passion for science. A few weeks ago, the athlete was very busy preparing the thesis that he must defend next year. A doctoral student in electrical engineering at Béthune in the north of France, he constantly seeks the difficult balance between sport and high-level studies. Rather skeptical
a priori
about what the psychologist of his training group could bring him, he now finds that his help is invaluable. “
It often happened to me to be in training and to think of an equation that I could not solve and inevitably, that bothered me. But by applying the techniques that the shrink showed us, I managed to dissociate my sport and my thesis.
"
Now that's all for the triple jump, thinking - Teddy Tamgho knows it - about his country.
"
Hugues wants to make Burkina proud
," testifies the coach.
When he talks to you about Burkina, we see stars in his eyes.
He also wants to do it to prove to himself that this guy from Ouaga can be the number one in the world in an indisputable and undisputed way.
He wants to do it.
"
And if he does, Hugues Fabrice Zango will become the first Burkinabè medalist at the Olympic Games.
►
See also: Japan: the Tokyo Olympics facing the 5th wave of Covid-19
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