Even if they aim for gold, silver always remains the main nerve of the war for any Olympic athlete. Recently, the example of the French javelin throwing champion, Jöna Aigouy, was particularly eloquent, the 24-year-old young woman being forced to sell some of her personal possessions, to increase the number of odd jobs and to create a Crowdfunding prize pool to finance his dream of participating in the Paris Games in 2024. Concerns that Rémy Boullé could have shared without his partnership with Bridgestone which, as a partner of the competition, created its “Team” of athletes that the recent paracanoe world vice-champion is joining this Friday.
“Of course, financially, it brings me a certain comfort,” confides the 35-year-old para-athlete. “When an athlete does not need to crowdfund to pay for his training days, he is obviously more focused on his training and progresses more quickly. To speak to you concretely, between now and the Games, I will complete around 250 days of training in ten months. This financial assistance that Bridgestone is giving me will undoubtedly allow me to have my wife and my daughter by my side at certain times, such as when I will be in Guadeloupe to train this winter because I would not be able to do so in the Hexagon due to the cold.” And he added: “I needed this partnership to perform, which is harder to achieve when you are not financially secure. All I want is for my sport to cost me zero. We have to finance the travel, the staff, and even if this is largely covered by the National Sports Agency (ANS), Bridgestone brings me a real plus by financing three to four weeks of internship.
Bronze medalist in 200m KL1 during the Tokyo Games in 2021, Rémy Boullé finds himself highlighted alongside Kevin Mayer (decathlon), Amandine Buchard (judo) or even Manon Brunet-Apithy (fencing), which is not not an anecdotal company. “I don’t know if it adds pressure,” he explains. “For me, it adds determination to succeed. On paper, being in the company of Kevin, Manon or Amandine means finding yourself with big names in French sport, multi-Olympic and world medalists. So it makes me want to do as well and be able, like them, to perform on the big day. They must serve as an example to me and being part of this Bridgestone team must offer me more emulation than pressure.” An emulation and motivation that the Orléanais recalls as follows: “When I’m a little tired, it should push me to move forward. Two or three years ago, I was able to listen to myself more, and perhaps too much, by shortening certain sessions or postponing certain exercises until the next day. There, inevitably, I tell myself that a lost session can never be made up for and I cannot afford this luxury. At that moment, I think of Kevin and I say to myself: would he miss a session just because he feels a little worse?
“That’s what we liked about Rémy’s journey,” says Bénédicte Bohbot, marketing director of the tire manufacturer. “It is in line with the values and the message that we want to convey in our campaign. That is to say that athletes do not rely on luck, but on the quality of their preparation to perform well on the big day. We fully recognize ourselves in this notion of work that he highlights and which drives him daily.”
And there is no point imagining this soldier, the victim of a terrible accident during parachuting training in 2014 which left him paraplegic, one day getting a big head: “No, that won’t happen because I didn’t have no real ego. When I met Emmanuel Macron, I told him that we can be President of the Republic, a billionaire like Donald Trump or an Olympic champion, we all remain human beings, who will die the same. So I don’t consider myself above another person, nor below. Afterwards, maybe if I had ten Olympic titles, I would have a little more ego. More seriously, this is not my vision of life and I come from a background where no one has an ego. As a soldier, ego simply kills. If you think you are superior, you risk your life much more.”