Tenth Worlds, 25 years in the France team, what does that mean to you? Mélina Robert-Michon: It’s quite a contradictory emotion. When I say 1998, yes, it’s long, I have trouble remembering exactly what happened. Among the athletes of the France team, there are plenty of them who were not born, that explains the point… We laugh a lot about it. At the same time, I don’t feel like I’ve been in the France team for 25 years, that it’s that long. That’s a pretty good sign. If I started to find the time long, it would be time to stop.
What memories do you have of 1998? Not that much, that’s when I think it’s been a long time actually. I remember that I arrived from the Junior World Championships, a competition that was a bit like summer camp, and then I found myself in this team, where, at that time, we felt tensions between groups. You come out of World Championships where everyone is nice and you find yourself with people who don’t talk to each other, everyone was in their own way, there was not this collective dimension: it’s not my best memory. I think there were three of us who arrived from the Junior World Championships and we said to ourselves: If this is the French team, we don’t want to go back, we want to stay with the young people! Besides, I hadn’t put in a good performance. I don’t have great memories of any of that.
Your exceptional longevity, do you pay attention to it? I admit that it begins to interest me to ask myself, for example, what is the record of participations in the World Championships. Me, it does not seem exceptional, because it is my course, I live it. But hearing about it, I think to myself: So, are there other people who have done this or not? (…) After my performance in Montreuil (65.49m at the end of May, editor’s note), I was impressed by the number of athletes or coaches who came to congratulate me and tell me that it was crazy , that it was huge, whereas I didn’t necessarily measure it. It’s his feedback that makes me say that it’s perhaps not so normal as it really is… It’s touching.
Do you think about the time of retirement? I’ve already said that it won’t be my last World Championships, I don’t want to stop in Paris (at the 2024 Olympics), having this barrier “That’s it, it’s over on the Olympics. I would like to go back to Tokyo (at the 2025 Worlds) in more normal conditions (than the 2021 Olympics) and be able to really enjoy it. The 2021 season has been very, very tough. I only digested my failure in Tokyo at the end of the 2022 season, it took a long time. I asked myself the question: Am I still in my place? Sometimes I thought, maybe I’ll quit. But there was this flame that was always there.
