Some would say it’s a coincidence. But it looks like fate. The path taken by the young 23-year-old Frenchwoman to become, Friday evening in Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, world champion in speed, the queen event of the velodromes, is really not trivial.
In 2014, Mathilde Gros is a thousand places from pressing the pedals but is a gifted basketball player, at the hope center of Aix-en-Provence. She started basketball at the age of four and she loves it. His idol is the playmaker of the France team Céline Dumerc. His dream: to plant three-point baskets at the Olympic Games.
Until, for fun, she gets on a training bike, a “wattbike”, one day when the French BMX pole shares the same weight room.
BMX coach Fabrice Vettoretti, now a coach in Japan, still can’t believe it: the young girl, who hated cycling and for whom even “going to high school by bike was already complicated”, explodes all the data of Powerful.
To the point that he immediately alerted the French Cycling Federation that a phenomenon was perhaps hatching before his eyes.
Mathilde Gros takes to the game and goes to take tests in Paris. They are convincing. His destiny is in motion.
– “Complicated moments” –
Grégory Baugé, then the reference of the French sprint, remembers his arrival at Insep. “She didn’t know anything about the track, she had never ridden a bike, but she was already saying that she wanted to be the best,” said the multiple world champion now national sprint coach.
Become the best, the native of Pas-de-Calais who grew up in the Bouches-du-Rhône does it quickly. She went on to win titles among young people, then won a world bronze in 2019 and became double European keirin champion.
The media are coming. Some are already celebrating the new Félicia Ballanger. It is the ultimate reference: triple Olympic champion, ten times world champion.
A hell of a pressure. And she gets lost. Doubt sets in. She hit rock bottom last year at the Tokyo Olympics and then at the Worlds in Roubaix. Demotivated, she is going through “complicated times”, an “overflow”, as she recalled on Friday evening, always with a smile.
The arrival at the start of the year of Baugé in the management is decisive. “We changed everything, started everything from the beginning. Why I had chosen cycling instead of basketball and why I was having fun before. Greg always tells me to love it and enjoy the present moment,” she said.
The fun returns. Confidence too. From now on, she looks her opponents in the eye, like Friday during her semi-final against the German Emma Hinze whom she stared at for a long time, with a tawny eye.
– Paris, “the ultimate goal” –
“I wanted to show him that I was there to win. And that I had changed too.”
Here she is world champion, at 23, a year earlier than when Félicia Ballanger won her first world title. Inevitably, comparisons will bloom again.
The pressure too, as we get closer to Paris-2024, “the ultimate goal”.
But she says she is ready to face it this time. Especially since she has already been there – “it will be useful for me for the future” – and that, finally, she finds this craze “logical when someone immediately walks strong among young people”.
On Friday, the one who joined a business school in Lyon also discovered the strength of popular support. “We don’t realize how powerful it is to have an audience. I tell myself that Paris is going to be so good in two years. It’s our track where we train every day. is with us what”.
“We will continue because we are still perfectible. It’s been quite a few Olympics that we haven’t been looking for a title. The objective is really to be Olympic champion. We’re not going to stop there,” insists Baugé.
