Since September 2019, Release follows the vice-world champion in a march towards the Tokyo Games which their postponement has not interrupted.
Regardless of the size, weight, ability of the body to resist and adapt to very intense and prolonged efforts: Covid-19 attacks everyone. Even athletes, despite having an iron health, are caught up by the virus. For a large majority, they remain asymptomatic, but some suffer with the typical symptoms (fever, aches, etc.). This is the case of Quentin Bigot.
“The worst was the fever”
“It was at the end of March, I got up one morning, I had a runny nose, I had no temperature but I felt tired. I thought of a little cold. The next morning I had the same feeling of tiredness, I still trained, but this is the last moment when I felt more or less well, because 24 hours later I was taken by a high fever while being cold, retrace Bigot. High fever, runny nose, sore throat came on top. But the worst part was the fever, I had trouble getting out of bed. For seven days, I was nailed. I didn’t have lung problems straight away, but when I was able to get up from my bed, so after a week of fever, I felt that I was out of breath quite quickly with the slightest effort. “ Bigot called in a doctor, in addition to the federation doctor who followed him remotely almost daily after a positive PCR test. “I did not do any other : I followed the instructions of the Social Security which, at that time, was to put themselves in solitary confinement for 10 days, then, if the symptoms had disappeared, they were considered cured. ”
As for millions of French people, isolating themselves to try not to transmit the virus to those close to them has been a problem. Especially since Quentin Bigot became a father last December: “I tried to distance myself from my son. We don’t really know how to behave in these circumstances, but hey, in the end everything went well for him. We knew that children are less attacked by Covid. We did our best to protect him, without psyching himself up either. On the other hand, something that I always find incredible, my partner Alexandra was not infected. She had two tests, both negative. I myself do not know where I was contaminated ”, says the athlete.
One more stress
The pitcher took back a life “normal” after nine days, following a protocol dictated by the doctor of the French Athletics Federation: “It’s a two-week journey. We have to start over very very gradually in terms of heart rate and strength. We followed that to the letter. At this time of recovery, it is important not to have any more symptoms or weird sensations. The first day, I made ten shots, at very low intensity. Then I did some weight training. The first week was all about ease ”, details Quentin Bigot who, in April, once recovered, took the road to Vittel, not to recover his health thanks to the thermal waters but for an internship at the Olympic preparation center: “Before nabbing the Covid, I was super fit, then I had to start from scratch. There Pierre-Jean [Vazelle, son entraîneur, ndlr] was a fundamental support in reassuring me : the Olympic season was still not compromised by this episode !»
Performance improved slowly during the two-week internship, then continued to improve after returning home. “I was relieved. In a way, it was a good time to catch the virus. Later, he would have really impacted the Olympic preparation, explains the launcher. The Covid was very hard physically but it also weighed on the psychological level, we wonder when we will be able to get out of it. When I was bedridden, I couldn’t even read or watch a screen, I had difficulty getting up and going to the bathroom. ” His own illness changed Quentin Bigot’s view of the overall situation: “I was aware that we were in an incredible global quagmire. The symptoms that I had are not trivial and on someone weak or with health problems it can become very dangerous. ”
Previous articles in the Let’s JO series with Quentin Bigot
# 1 Quentin Bigot, his hammer, his past, his coach, his medal; # 2 The loneliness of the hammer thrower; # 3 By train to work; # 4 “We don’t know when we can get back to the stadium, normalcy”; # 5 The well-confined hammer; # 6 The revived hammer; # 7 Like a cage pitcher; # 8 Aren’t we making a little hammer video? ; # 9 Pierre-Jean Vazel, a self-taught coach
“Because of the Covid we had to give up the European Cup on the 8th May in Split. It was better to skip this competition, to be better later, expose Bigot. The line is now drawn at least until the French championships at the end of June. This week, I have to go to the meeting in Halle in Germany but we do not yet know if foreigners will be able to take part. Otherwise, my first competition could be the 22 May in Andujar in the south of Spain. “ In these pandemic times, the conditional is essential.
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