He manages to run the 100m in under 10 seconds, yet the young Frenchman lacks the funds to participate in the 2024 Paris Olympics. Sprinter Meba-Mickael Zeze throws a kitten online
“I’ve been tired of knocking on doors for three years and nothing has happened. I’m killing myself with high goals and what I’m touching is ridiculous. A year after the Games I can’t go on”, observes bitterly Meba-Mickael Zeze, with AFP.
In 2022, the 28-year-old sprinter had the best season of his life, including a crazy July day in La Chaux-de-Fonds (Switzerland), a miracle track for sprints, breaking the ten second barrier over the 100m (9, 99 ) and twenty seconds over the 200 m (19.97). An extremely rare feat for a Habs, not seen since the good years of Christophe Lemaitre.
Also a mainstay of the 4x100m relay, Zeze reached the world final with his teammates in July in Eugene (Oregon) then won European silver in August in Munich (Germany).
An unstable situation
To earn a living, he works part-time as a community manager for the sports marketing company Adjan and is sponsored by the telecommunications company Resadia. Without a main home, he navigates between his training in Antony, in the Paris suburbs, where his club in Mandelieu-la-Napoule, near Cannes, finances his nights, and his new partner’s apartment in the south where he can hosting shared custody of her five-year-old son.
“It’s not ideal,” whispers Mickael who regrets not getting any direct help from the French Athletics Federation (FFA). The institution replies that he receives at least a few thousand euros a year, in addition to bonuses to reward his investment in the relay.
Kitty online
Insufficient for an athlete who needs “25,000 euros a year” until the Paris Games and has just launched a kitten online to save a career “in jeopardy”. Zeze’s tense situation illustrates the strategy of the “commando” of France and the National Sports Agency (ANS), a high-level fundraiser, to shine at the Olympics: betting heavily on a small number of potential medalists (less than ten in Athletics) .
With the failed individual European Championships (eliminated in the semi-finals of the 100 and 200 m), Zeze seems very far from the solo podium at the Paris Olympics, and therefore from the lists that allow substantial aid, which is still being defined. end of the year.
“We are ready to help Zeze, for example for a CIP (Professional Integration Agreement)”, Patrick Ranvier assures AFP. DTN athletics, which has taken over a rocking boat for a year, wants to remember the numbers: the FFA in 2022 allocated 2.5 million euros in aid to athletes (direct or through employment contracts) and financed 900,000 euros on stage.
“End of Laxity”
To shine in the medium term, Ranvier says he has launched a “cultural revolution” to bring together now-dispersed athletes, create “emulation” and end a certain “laxity”.
In hollow, Zeze would be better served joining a federal facility, instead of trusting his young trainer Elliot Draper. The athlete, however, claims to have been rejected by the Insep (National Institute of Sport, Expertise and Performance) in Paris in 2021. But since nothing is ever simple in the small environment of the tricolor tartan, Zeze wanted to be coached by Guy Ontanon , the disgraced former federal star coach, now out of the frame. And he did not want to support Dimitri Demonière, the official coach of Insep, cold with the torch bearers of the 4×100 m, which he directed until a post-Tokyo Games mutiny in 2021. Meanwhile, eighteen months after the Games, you can always race in France — in less than ten seconds — after the aids.
