The French team leaves Rome with 13 podiums after the silver medals in the 4x100m medley relay and Yohann Ndoye Brouard’s bronze medal in the 100m backstroke.
The French swimmers achieved a nice silver double on Wednesday evening in the two 4x100m medley relays which closed the European Swimming Championships in Rome, the boys behind the untouchable Italians, the girls overtaken by the Swedish favorites.
The girls led by example. Pauline Mahieu (backstroke), Charlotte Bonnet (breaststroke), Marie Wattel (butterfly) and Beryl Gastaldello (freestyle) smashed the French record for this distance, with a time of 3’56”36, three seconds better than the old record, but could not compete with the Swedes, whose last runner, the multi-medalist Sarah Sjoestroem, went for gold. The Dutch complete the podium. It was the twelfth medal of the French delegation in Rome but the party was not over.
A few minutes later, Yohann Ndoye Brouard, European champion in the 200m backstroke, then Antoine Viquerat (breaststroke), Clément Secchi (butterfly) and Maxime Grousset (freestyle) did as well as the girls. With a time of 3’32”50, they finished very far from the Italian relay, untouchable (more than four seconds ahead) but ahead of the Austrians. For Ndoye Brouard, it was his second medal of the day, he who took the bronze medal in the 100m backstroke at the start of the program, behind the Italian Thomas Ceccon and the Greek Apostolos Christou. The final results will therefore be 13 medals (3 gold, 7 silver and 3 bronze) for French swimming in Rome, after very successful championships. An encouraging harvest in the perspective of the Paris Games, in two years.
