In Budapest, Hungary where the world athletics championships are taking place, Hugues-Fabrice Zango offered a new medal to his country, Burkina Faso, after the Olympic bronze in Tokyo, the silver of the 2022 world championships in Eugene, Oregon. For connoisseurs, this performance is not a surprise since Zango holds the world record for men’s triple jump indoors since he made a jump of 18.07 m, at the Stadium Pellez in Aubière, in Puy- du-Dôme, in Auvergne on January 16, 2021, becoming the first man to jump beyond 18 meters indoors.
By delivering a very high level competition in Budapest where he succeeded in four jumps over 17.20 m, he seized gold and the world title in the triple jump this year. He is ahead of two Cubans, Lazaro Martinez, silver medalist with a triple jump measured at 17.41m and Cristian Napoles, who achieved a centimeter less (17.40m), his record.
This Zango title is already making your mouth water when it comes to the triple jump competition which will be held in Paris at the 2024 Olympic Games. The Burkinabè will indeed have the opportunity to confront the star of the discipline, the Portuguese Cristian Pichardo, as well as the young Jamaican prodigy, Jaydon Hibbert, who suffered from a muscular problem during the competition of these championships in Budapest.
This title of world champion comes some two weeks after the gold medal that the Burkinabè triple jumper won at the Games of La Francophonie which recently took place in Kinshasa, in the Democratic Republic of Congo from July 28 to August 6. He beat the Senegalese Amath Faye (16.61 m) and the Armenian Levon Aghasyan (16.40 m).
His performance: 17.11 m. For the Burkinabè, also a doctoral student in Industrial Engineering at the University of Béthune, in the North of France, near Lille, this performance comes after a first participation in the Games of La Francophonie in 2013 in Nice, when he was 20 years old. , and a gold medal won at the following edition, in Abidjan in 2017.
“I feel a lot, a lot of joy, after winning the gold medal of the Games of La Francophonie for the second time in a row,” he told the press after his performance at the Martyrs stadium in Kinshasa. “It’s now three victories in a row that I’ve been chaining since July (at different athletics meetings), it bodes very well for the world championships which take place in two weeks”, had– he thinks. The title of world champion he has just won has proven him right.
