Grégory Baugé, nine times world track champion, announced on Sunday that he would give up the Tokyo Olympics and end his career. The French rider, who will be 36 at the end of the month, is the most successful French rider of his generation with four gold medals in individual speed, the queen event of velodromes.
“I have always been at 100% and I have found that I was no longer in this pattern,” explained the Guadeloupe in the Stade 2 program of France Televisions. “Overnight, I felt that I was 90% constrained, it is not enough to seek a performance at the Olympics.” In the jersey of the France team, he accumulated world titles in two events, team speed between 2006 and 2015, individual speed between 2009 and 2015.
If he could not achieve his dream of becoming Olympic champion in speed, a title that has eluded the French school for nearly half a century (Daniel Morelon in 1972), he won four medals at the Olympics, three silver and one bronze, over the course of his three participations, in Beijing, London and Rio.
He dreamed of Olympic gold
“I miss the Olympic title,” admitted the almost irremovable starter of the French speed team on Sunday. “But my biggest regret is having lost a world title to my teammates”. A reference to the two world titles of 2011, in individual and team speed, which were withdrawn from him because of breaches of geolocation in the anti-doping regulations.
Baugé, who cut off his competitive activity twice after the London and Rio Olympics, then returned to the podiums. Especially during the last Track World Championships organized in France, in Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, when he set the national Velodrome on fire by winning two gold medals.
