The Hindu : Sport : Manaudou — rebuilding her life and career

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Manaudou — rebuilding her life and career

— PHOTO: AFP

SEEKING FIRM GROUND: Laure Manaudou, whose life has been a rollercoaster ride ever since her career took off, is now looking for stability.

Paris: If French swimming star Laure Manaudou’s career once resembled a fairy tale, it has slowly turned into a soap opera, most of it painful and much of it — far too much of it — played out in public.

In 2004, she became the first-ever French woman — and the first French man or woman in 52 years — to win a swimming Olympic gold medal. She was only 17. One year later, she reprised her Olympic gold medal performance in the 400m freestyle to win the world championship in the same event in Montreal. In May 2006, at the French Championships at Tours, she beat Janet Evans’s 18-year-old world record for the 400m freestyle, then lowered it by nearly another second in August 2006 at the European Championships in Budapest, where she won four titles.

At the 2007 World championships in Melbourne, she won golds in the 400m freestyle and 200m freestyle setting a world record in the shorter discipline, silver medals in the 800m freestyle and 100m backstroke and a bronze in the 4x200m freestyle relay.

Tall, attractive, with a winning, photogenic smile, Manaudou embodied the French ideal of physical beauty and precocious success. When she returned home from Melbourne, she was greeted as a national heroine.

She was a star and, just as important for the French, she was in love and flaunted it. Her romance with Italian swimmer Luca Marin was the talk of the Melbourne championships.

Following the Melbourne competition, Manaudou announced that she was leaving her coach Philippe Lucas, to join Marin in Turin and train there.

“I am choosing love,” Manaudou said. “I want to live with him and have a child with him.”

Falling apart

Then, almost overnight, euphoria turned to nightmare, as everything went incredibly wrong — beginning with her love affair. In the few months since that painful chapter in her life, Manaudou has changed trainers twice. She then suffered an embarrassing defeat in her specialty, the 400m freestyle, at the April 2008 French championships, and broke down in tears in front of the television cameras.

“I’m not a machine, I don’t win all the time,” she told the daily L’Equipe afterwards.

She also admitted to never having experienced as much stress before, and that perhaps her days as the French wunderkind of swimming were over.“In 2004, I was 17 years old,” she said. “I did everything without thinking. I didn’t even think about whether I was in pain or not. I just swam. Now I think too much, and that causes me stress. I’ve got to put an end to that.”

In Beijing, Manaudou will not be competing in the 200m freestyle, for which she still holds the world record. She will race in the 400m freestyle and the 100m and 200m backstroke, as well as the 4x100m medley relay.

If things go well, she will return to France as just an ordinary champion.

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