On the last evening of the PyeongChang Paralympic Games, Sunday March 18, his name was displayed on the official website of the competition in second place among podium subscribers. Four gold medals in alpine skiing. Only one athlete is ahead of her, the Slovakian Henrieta Farkasova, with the same number of titles, but an additional silver medal. She admits to being 31 years old. Marie Bochet has just celebrated her 24th birthday.
The young Savoyard, born with agenesis of the left forearm, lit up the PyeongChang Games with her talent and her domination. Four years earlier, at the Sochi Games, she had achieved the same harvest. A Paralympic quadruplet, previously unheard of for a French athlete. A fall in slalom, her favorite discipline, deprived her of a stunning grand slam.
In South Korea, failure awaited him at the turn of the penultimate gate of the first portion of the super-combined. She was not disappointed at all. “Just frustration,” she said, “because I was skiing really well. But maybe I'm not destined to achieve the grand slam. »
With it, alpine skiing is reduced to an equation with a single unknown: victory or fall. But to the great misfortune of her rivals, the Frenchwoman barely fell. Christian Fémy, the technical director of French disabled skiing, did his math: “Before the PyeongChang Games, she had fallen only once, during a pre-season race. The year of the Sochi Games, she had 12 successes in slalom before experiencing her first fall in the Paralympic event. Marie knows how to adapt her skiing to the conditions and circumstances. She leaves nothing to chance. She is the pilot of her own project. »
In Beaufort, not far from Albertville, where her parents operate a heifer farm and produce cheese, Marie Bochet discovered skiing at the age of 5. Very early on, her potential allowed her to join a local club, where she shared the training of able-bodied athletes. Her father Yvon says: “She got into disabled skiing backwards, because for the first time in her life she realized that she had a disability. At home, we never treated her like a disabled person. »
At 16, she participated in her first Paralympic Games, in Vancouver in 2010. She came very close to the podium, but without being able to climb it. Since then, his entire life has been organized around his sporting ambition. Recruited by the Army, where she was seconded to train full-time, she was also enrolled at Sciences-Po Paris, within a sector dedicated to high-level athletes. “She is extremely meticulous and methodical,” says her physiotherapist and friend, Clara Noël. In his daily life, everything is organized according to his ambition: to ski as well as possible. Victory is only the consequence of this quest for excellence. »
Sunday March 18, she decided herself the strategy to adopt to tackle a slalom full of traps. Then, with her fourth gold medal in her pocket, she ran into the stands to join her clan, a group of 24 people, family and friends, who had come to support her at the Games. “High-level sport requires a degree of selfishness,” analyzes his father. To maintain balance, Marie takes care of others a lot. While preparing for her first race, she was worried about whether we had traveled well. »
