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| French star Teddy Tamgho heads into the Paris 2011 European Athletics Indoor Championships in sparkling form. |
Hosts France will field a very strong team at the European Athletics Indoor Championships, which will be held on home soil in Paris from 4-6 March, including their superstars Christophe Lemaitre, Renaud Lavillenie, Teddy Tamgho and Myriam Soumaré.
Lemaitre, Lavillenie and Soumaré all won gold medals at the European Athletics Championships in Barcelona while Tamgho has been in sparking form and set a world indoor triple jump record of 17.91m at the French indoor championships last weekend.
Lemaitre's feat of becoming the first man to win the 100m, 200m and 4x100m titles helped earn him the honour of being the 2010 European Athlete of the Year while Tamgho, who won at the 2010 World Indoor Championships, was voted as the 2010 European Rising Star of the Year.
French athletics fans will be looking for an improvement on their medal haul at the last championships two years ago in Torino, when they took two gold medals, two silvers and two bronzes, but will be heartened by the fact that Les Bleus were the second country on the medal table in Barcelona with 18 medals, seven of them gold.
“We are going to try to do well in front of our home audience. For us, this is the ideal scenario. There will some apprehension of course, but lots of enthusiasm, naturally. The ambition of the France team is to give the public plenty to cheer. Emotion is not measured just by the performances but if we meet this first objective, which we know we can with the quality of our athletes, then we will be well placed to win medals,” said the French federation’s national technical director Ghani Yalouz.
“My goal with all my staff is to help improve this group from Team France, and this will help give them experience. This event is for me an essential step on the road which leads to London (the venue for the 2012 Olympic Games). I hope they have a lot of great experiences. I trust them that they will excel and wear our colours proudly,” he added.
Among France’s other big medal hopes are Leslie Dhjone in the men’s 400m, who leads this winter’s European rankings, and the young 60m hurdlers Dimitri Bascou and Garfield Darien.
The complete 47-strong French team can be seen on the French federation website here.