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A French Olympic diver has responded to the ‘ridiculous’ tumble he took off a diving board during the inauguration ceremony Thursday for a new Olympic aquatic centre in Paris.
“I fell in front of the president,” Alexis Jandard said in French in a video shared with Britain’s Sky News, referring to French President Emmanuel Macron, who was attending the ceremony. “I fell in front of the whole of France.”
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Despite the tumble, the 26-year-old seemed to be in good spirits. “I’m speaking because, with what happened, I think you want a little debrief,” he said. “So I’m going to explain what happened this morning.”
He continued: “First of all, I want to reassure everyone, everything in fine. I didn’t hurt myself. There was a little bit of blood but that is OK. That won’t stop me from going to practice this afternoon.”
To BFMTV, Jandard said, “The fall was ridiculous… it’s part of the game. If I look at the fall it’s funny.
“It’s something that happens to us in diving — not regularly but it’s not surprising. It happens in training sometimes, in competition. But there it was in front of the president during the inauguration of the pool. I told myself it was the worst moment!”
Jandard represented France at the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo (held in 2021), where he competed in the men’s three-metre springboard event. He also participated in the World Aquatics Championships in 2015 and 2019, and he won a bronze medal in the men’s 10-metre platform event at the European Games in Baku, Azerbaijan, in 2015.
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In the video, Jandard can be seen slipping while preparing to dive, then bouncing on his back and buttocks before slipping off the board and in the water below.
Jandard told French sports news channel RMC Sport: “I’ve broken boards before, but the board had never broken me before. Now it has. I would have preferred this ceremony to have gone well from start to finish. There was that little hitch. If it made people smile a little, so much the better.”
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