"At 12, I only swam once a day, and even then"... The Yu Zidi case "challenges" Camille Lacourt

Camille, what do Yu Zidi's performances at the age of 12 inspire in you? Camille Lacourt: It's obvious that it interests me. It's a question I've been asking myself for two days now, ever since I saw her in the semi-finals of the 200m medley, and I don't have the answer. In fact, the questions that come to me most are how she managed, during the Chinese Championships, to take on three 200m butterfly, three 200m medley, and three 400m medley races in one week. To do that, you must have put in a lot of work. How long has she been training ten to twelve kilometers a day? It's all quite curious, everything that goes into it. After that, I don't know; it's a different culture anyway. I don't necessarily have an answer, I don't necessarily have a judgment. I'm just saying that it raises questions and that it's something that needs to be addressed fairly quickly.

In absolute terms, are you worried about her future and her ability to last? I don't know anything about this young lady's life. It's true that at first glance, I would say that it's very premature to reach such a level, at such an age. Then, maybe she's just a genius who arrives and who has an extraordinary feeling for water, an outstanding athlete like we discover every 100 years. I don't know... It's just that she's very young and we have to be careful about all that. But I don't have all the necessary data to be able to form a more concrete, more clear-cut opinion. Her case questions me enormously, but I don't have the skills or the data to go further.

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Does the fact that she comes from China raise even more questions? If you're referring to doping, I had very strong positions at one time that relied on positive doping tests. At the time, I said nothing other than things that had been proven. I like to hope that at 12 years old, we're not there yet. Clearly.

We hope that for her, it will go well until she is completely built.

Camille Lacourt

Wouldn't it be like a new form of doping to push children to overtrain? (Smiles) What would a Biowoman be then? They genetically tested her when she was 3 years old and changed her genes. Okay, it could be a good series on Netflix. More seriously, I don't know. It's too new and I don't have the necessary perspective to assert things peremptorily. The only thing that comes to mind is that it's crazy.

At 12, could you have handled such a huge workload? At 12, I didn't even swim twice a day (laughs). I only swam once a day, and even then. That was when I was very tall and very thin, so muscularly, it wouldn't have held up. After all, we're all different. Plus, I'm really a counter-example in terms of precocity. I started gaining weight at 25. It took me a very long time to get there. Now, it's true that in any case, it's still very young. We don't have a lot of data. Unfortunately, we certainly won't have much in the future either. But we're going to monitor this closely. We hope that for her, things will go well until she's completely built.