Reigning world champion and 3rd in the triathlon test event on the Olympic course, Dorian Coninx will approach the Games at home with confidence. Meeting with a French triathlete full of confidence, before one of the most important seasons of his career.
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One thousand five hundred meters of swimming, 40 kilometers of cycling, 10 kilometers of walking and an entire season of training and preparation… This is “all” that now separates Dorian Coninx from his Grail: a gold medal which would be historic for France in triathlon.
But as he approaches one of the most important seasons of his life, the native of Isère has the serenity of someone who knows how to go about it. And for good reason, he is coming off the season of his life: in September, he was crowned world champion during the grand final in Olympic format of the World Triathlon Championship Series (WTCS) circuit.
A month earlier, he impressed on the circuit where he hopes to shine in Paris: third on the test event of the Olympic course. For the French Federation, these performances are equivalent to a first-rate criterion and therefore he is “preselected” for Paris. There remains a simple confirmation criterion to validate to show the Federation that these performances do not collapse in 2024. Normally, a formality.
First preselection of his career
“My main goal before the general classification was the pre-selection. It turns out that both of them were successful, so that’s really, really cool.”
At 29 years old, the Isérois (south-east of France) will therefore experience – barring injury or incident – his third Olympic Games, after Rio and Tokyo. Experiences with mixed memories but from which he declares having gained experience for the rest of his career.
“In the last two Olympics, I was not preselected so I had the pressure, having to run all the races at the start of the season, thinking only about that…”, he relates. Far from being ideal for be ready on the big day.
“In Rio, I was relatively young, I was 22 years old. I had huge problems with regularity. I had no peace of mind about my ability to reproduce what I knew I was capable of doing and so I was a little overwhelmed by events,” he recalls.
Disappointed in Rio, relay medalist in Tokyo
That year, Dorian Coninx had a good performance in swimming but completely ruined his race during the swim-bike transition. He is in 36th place.
“I was disappointed but I think it helped me a lot afterwards. I questioned a lot of things and it was one of the moments when I most advanced my perception of sport and my career,” he believes in hindsight.
In Tokyo, he arrived with great ambitions, even if his eyes were fixed on his compatriot Vincent Luis, then double world champion. In the heat of Tokyo, he had an almost perfect race, long anticipating a top 5 which would have been the best French performance in history at the Olympics. But everything collapsed due to a heat stroke 2 km from the goal.
‘There was more control, I produced a performance which was still much more accomplished. He hadn’t missed a lot, but I was a little far from the mark, so there was still a little frustration,” he analyzes.
The bronze medal won in the mixed relay, France’s first Olympic medal in the discipline, concludes the Japanese Olympiad on a note of hope. But Dorian Coninx still has a strange taste for it.
“I was very happy because the relay is close to my heart. But at the same time, I think that given that triathlon is basically an individual sport, it made me even more want to achieve an individual medal… And we placed third and we can see that that’s all for the first, so it makes you want to be first even more… It was a much more joyful experience, but if it could be even better, it wouldn’t be bad,” he believes.
Six thousand calories a day “and no Big Mac”
And to achieve this, Dorian Coninx will commit himself to the monk’s life which is the daily life of the triathlete: 28 sessions per week for 35 hours of sport with swimming, cycling and running every day as well as “invisible training”: 6000 calories ingested daily “of quality stuff and not the Big Mac”, a sleep rhythm to monitor and mental preparation. What to drive crazy?
“The goal is to do this invisible training without feeling like it’s training. I eat because I eat good things and because it makes me happy. Because if we have the impression of being under pressure 24 hours a day, I won’t be able to hold on at all. So now it’s so anchored, so automated that anyway at 10 p.m. I’m tired and I go to bed,” he says. “In fact, I take it a bit like a game. In my youth, I played a lot of role-playing games on the internet, well I take it like that. I try to push the sliders to be better. And to From the moment we are having fun, we are no longer under pressure.”
Hoping that on July 30, 2024, Dorian Coninx will be able to fully exploit all of his characteristics to succeed in the final level of the great triathlon game: winning gold on the banks of the Seine.