Our special correspondent at the Accor Arena
Shirine, how do you feel after this first title at the Accor Arena? Shirine Boukli: It’s huge. It was really important to me to establish myself here. I place this Grand Slam on the same level as the World or European Championships. It was a box I wanted to check. It’s a first title this year and it’s really great.
Six months before the Paris 2024 Olympics, was it the best time to impose yourself? I don’t know if it was the best time, but I know that we always need, as a high-level athlete, of victories and confidence. I also needed to take girls that I wasn’t used to taking, as was the case today in the previous rounds.
Do you consider this a full-scale rehearsal for Paris 2024? Yes, clearly. It was an important competition for me, in which I had to give my all without calculating. And then the adversity was very high, which is necessarily good preparation. The day required a lot of energy, even if the French public supported me throughout. I had to hang on.
In this final, you experienced an astonishing emotional lift, with a victory canceled then an ippon from the Japanese also canceled before your definitive success…Yes, it was a shocking final (smile). I thought I had scored on the first action, except that it was taken away from me. Same for her. Each time, I tried to stay focused, to get back into it straight away. I couldn’t get stuck on this otherwise I risked becoming a spectator of my own match and suffering. I was able to overcome several emotions, from joy to concentration again. I feel like I’ve reached a milestone on this front. I’m growing, I’m gaining experience, I’m learning a lot and on this day, we can clearly see that there is progress in many areas.
During the standstill in the final, we saw you smile…Yes, I’ve been working on this for a while. I work on this aspect a lot because in judo, there is a standing aspect but also on the ground. Before, I sometimes had solutions on the ground that I didn’t take. I worked a lot and it’s a real satisfaction to achieve this against a Japanese woman, for whom this is normally their strong point. To have been able to counter it in this area and to win in this way is the fruit of work that pays off. I’m happy to see that it works and that I’m not doing this for nothing.
She won’t be the Japanese of the 2024 Olympics, but this success can still be useful to you…Yes, of course. All the fights will help me for the Games. The Japanese who will participate in Paris 2024 is also a left-hander, who does not have the same profile at all but it still remains somewhat the same patterns. There, I took what there was to take and I’m going to do some work on the video to see what I did well and less well in this final. And too bad if it’s not a girl I would take to the Games, anything is fair game.