The sunny streets of Seville, Spain, suit the Tricolores perfectly. Morhad Amdouni and Méline Rollin established new French marathon records there on Sunday February 18.
At 35, the first lowered his own mark, completing the event in 2:03:47. He finished second in the men’s distance, behind the Ethiopian Deresa Geleta Sulfata (2:03:27). The native of Porto-Vecchio, Corsica, had held the national reference since 2022 and the Paris marathon, which he finished in 2:05:22. This Sunday, he even came close to the European record – 2:03:36 – set by Belgian Bashir Abdi in 2021 in Rotterdam (Netherlands).
A few minutes later, Méline Rollin crossed the finish line in 2:24:12, erasing Christelle Daunay, record holder since 2010 (2:24:22). The 25-year-old runner placed seventh in the event, won by Ethiopian Azmera Gebru (2:22:13).
Tribute to Kelvin Kiptum
Fourth Frenchman in the Valencia marathon (Spain), at the beginning of December 2023, Morhad Amdouni was not at the top of the list for the Olympic selection and he knew that he had to achieve a good performance in Seville if he wanted to continue to hope to participate in the Games in Paris. Méline Rollin, for her part, was not yet qualified.
Less than six months before the opening ceremony, ten athletes – five men and five women – have already achieved the minimums required by World Athletics. The others have until April 30 to do so, but only three will compete in the Olympics in each category.
Thanks to their good times achieved earlier in the winter, Mehdi Frère and Nicolas Navarro among the men, as well as Mekdes Woldu and Mélody Julien among the women, seem, at this stage, priority, according to the selection methods of the French Federation athletics.At the end of Sunday’s race, Morhad Amdouni and Méline Rollin are well on their way to completing the group.
Furthermore, before the start of the Seville marathon, a tribute was paid to the Kenyan Kelvin Kiptum, world record holder for the event, killed with his trainer in a car accident, six days earlier. He was 24 years old. On October 8, 2023 in Chicago, Illinois (United States), Kelvin Kiptum approached the symbolic two-hour mark (2:00:35), beating, to everyone’s surprise, by almost one minute his compatriot the legend Eliud Kipchoge (2:01:09, in Berlin in 2022).
