To see genuine smiles in the French clan in Val d’Isère this weekend, it was better to make your way between the English tourists to sit in front of the TV in a bar in the Savoyard resort broadcasting Romane Miradoli’s second place in the super-G of Saint-Moritz in Switzerland than to push to the face of Bellevarde. Because the day after a catastrophic giant for the Blues with Léo Anguenot’s 19th place as the best performance, the French slalom elite had a bad Sunday, with Clément Noël in the lead.
In the resort where he arrived as a teenager from his native Vosges and where he is still licensed, the reigning Olympic champion in the specialty missed his first round. Eighth with more than a second in sight, the skier sped away, jaw clenched, quickly away from the finish area, skipping the protocol interviews.
“He gets through it completely”
“I was very disappointed and very angry with myself after the first round because I skied haphazardly,” he admits looking back. “There is disappointment, because he goes through completely on this first round,” agrees Kevin Page, coach of the Blues technical group.
Much more precise and aggressive in the second round at the start of the afternoon, Clément Noël reconnected with his old demons by riding, aborting a potential nice comeback while he was virtually in the lead.
An elimination, combined with that of Paco Rassat, winner in Gurgl in November, in the morning and the frustrating ninth place for Steven Amiez, which forced the French delegation to try to give something positive to the whole by promoting the eleventh and twelfth places of the young Auguste Aulnette and Hugo Desgrippes.
“By skiing like that, we’re going to have a great Clément”
But for a home outing less than two months before the Milan-Cortina Olympic Games, the French public returned frustrated to the valley. “It’s not because you have two slightly average rounds that you have to question everything. Skiing is like that, now we get up and move forward, puts Kevin Page into perspective. In the second round, we found the Clément we know. By skiing like that, we’re going to have a great Clement this winter. »
“If someone asks me which round is the best, I say the second because if I do it twice like the first, I finish sixteenth and that’s not at all interesting,” underlines the person concerned, second to start the season in Levi then 12th in Gurgl. This is really what I wanted to do. I had a good reaction. »
Giantists and slalom racers will now head to Italy and Alta Badia for a new World Cup stage just before the holidays. Where we will have to forget this single passage on the French snow before the Olympics.
