Christophe Lemaitre

Christophe Lemaitre
Lemaitre at the 2011 World Championships
nation	France
birthday	11th June 1990 (age 30)
place of birth	Annecy
size	190 cm
Weight	74 kg
Career
discipline	sprint
society	AS Aix-les-Bains
Trainer	Pierre Carraz
status	active
Medal table
Olympic games 0 × 0 × 2 × World championships 0 × 1 × 1 × European championships 4 × 2 × 1 × Indoor European Championships 0 × 0 × 1 × Junior World Championship 1 × 0 × 0 × Junior European Championship 1 × 0 × 0 ×
Olympic games bronze London 2012 4 × 100 m bronze Rio de Janeiro 2016 200 m  World championships silver Daegu 2011 4 × 100 m bronze Daegu 2011 200 m  European championships gold Barcelona 2010 100 m gold Barcelona 2010 200 m gold Barcelona 2010 4 × 100 m gold Helsinki 2012 100 m bronze Helsinki 2012 4 × 100 m silver Zurich 2014 100 m silver Zurich 2014 200 m bronze Zurich 2014 4 × 100 m  European Indoor Championships bronze Paris 2011 60 m  Junior World Championships gold Bydgoszcz 2008 200 m  Junior European Championships gold Novi Sad 2009 100 m
last change: August 19, 2016

Christophe Lemaitre (often incorrectly spelled Lemaître ; born June 11, 1990 in Annecy ) is a French sprinter .

Career and Success

Internationally, he made his first appearance at the 2007 World Athletics Championships in Ostrava . There he finished fourth in the 100-meter run and fifth in the 200-meter run . A year later he won the gold medal over 200 meters at the World Junior Athletics Championships in 2008 in Bydgoszcz . He was then nominated as a substitute runner for the French 4 x 100 meter relay at the Olympic Games in Beijing , but was not used there.

Since 2009 Lemaitre has also started in the adult sector. At the European Indoor Championships in Turin , he reached the semi-finals in the 60-meter run . However, he achieved the outstanding result of this season at the Junior European Championships in Novi Sad . He won the title over 100 meters in 10.04 s and improved Dwain Chambers' junior European record by two hundredths of a second.

With this achievement Lemaitre traveled as the fastest European in the world annual best list to the World Championships 2009 in Berlin , where he made it into the quarter-finals with the fifth fastest time of all participants in the first round. There he was disqualified because of a false start. With the French 4 x 100 meter relay, he took eighth place.

On July 9, 2010, he ran the 100 meters in 9.98 s at the French Championships in Valence, making him the world's first (and until June 22, 2018 only) white sprinter to stay under 10 seconds. In addition, he undercut the French national record set by Ronald Pognon by a hundredth of a second. The following day, he also secured the title in the 200-meter run in 20.16 s, thus equalizing the almost 23-year-old French record set by Gilles Quénéhervé . At the European Championships in Barcelona in 2010 , he won the distance of 100 meters in 10.11 seconds. Since the European Championships in 1962 , where Claude Piquemal won, a Frenchman has again been European champion at this distance. He also won the European title over 200 meters. On the last day of the competition, he won his third gold medal at these European championships with the 4 x 100 meter relay. With his three victories, Lemaitre is the first athlete to win gold medals at the same European championships over these three distances. In the same year he was voted France's Sportsman of the Year (“ Champion des champions ”) by the sports newspaper L'Équipe .

On August 29, 2010, Lemaitre increased his personal best over 100 meters by a hundredth of a second at the IAAF World Challenge in Rieti, Italy . In the race, in which five runners stayed under 10 seconds, he finished fourth behind Nesta Carter , Ryan Bailey and Mario Forsythe in 9.97 s.

At the European Indoor Championships in 2011 in Paris, Lemaitre won the bronze medal in the 60-meter run behind the Portuguese Francis Obikwelu and the British Dwain Chambers. In the outdoor season, he made further improvements in the 100-meter run. On June 7, 2011, it increased to 9.96 s in Montreuil. Eleven days later, he ran another hundredth of a second faster when he won the European Athletics Team Championships in Stockholm. He achieved the best time for a European in the last seven years since Francis Obikwelu had improved the European record to 9.86 s at the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens. Shortly thereafter, Lemaitre ran again at the Athletissima in Lausanne for 9.95 s and was third behind the Jamaicans Asafa Powell and Michael Frater . At the French Championships on July 29, 2011, he improved his time to 9.92 s.

At the World Championships in Daegu , Lemaitre finished fourth in the 100 meters after 10.19 s. In the 200-meter run, he secured the bronze medal behind Usain Bolt from Jamaica and Walter Dix from the United States. With 19.80 s he undercut his personal best and the French record by 36 hundredths of a second. He was only eight hundredths of a second short of the European record set by Italian Pietro Mennea . In the 4 x 100 meter relay, he won the silver medal behind the Jamaican team, which set a new world record with 37.04 s, together with Teddy Tinmar , Yannick Lesourd and Jimmy Vicaut in 38.20 s.

At the European Championships in Helsinki in 2012 , he again won gold over 100 meters in a time of 10.09 s. With the 4 x 100 relay, this time he only finished third behind the teams from the Netherlands and Germany. In view of his Olympic preparation, he had decided not to defend his title in the 200-meter run from the outset.

In London , he decided not to compete over 100 meters at the 2012 Olympic Games in order to concentrate on a medal over 200 meters. In the final he had no chance in sixth. Due to a positive doping test at Tyson Gay , the French relay received the bronze medal in May 2015.

At the 2013 World Championships in Moscow , he did it the other way around and this time reached the final over the 100-meter distance. With 10.06 s he was seventh.

At the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro , he won the bronze medal in 20.12 seconds behind Usain Bolt and Andre De Grasse. This was the first medal for France in the 200-meter run at the Olympic Games since the 1960 Olympic Games in Rome . For his medal win, he received the Knight's Cross of the Ordre national du Mérite on November 30, 2016 .

Christophe Lemaitre is 1.89 m tall and has a competition weight of 74 kg. He is trained by Pierre Carraz and starts for AS Aix-les-Bains .

Top performances

• 100 m: 9.92 s, July 29, 2011, Albi
• 200 m: 19.80 s, September 3, 2011, Daegu
• 60 m (hall): 6.55 s, February 13, 2010, Aubière

Web links

Commons : Christophe Lemaitre  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Christophe Lemaitre in the database of World Athletics (English)
• Athlete portrait by Christophe Lemaitre on the FFA website of the French Athletics Federation
• Christophe Lemaitre in the Sports-Reference database (English; archived from the original )

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Le Républicain Lorrain: Lemaitre, enfant du paradis (French), May 30, 2009
2. ↑ Leichtathletik.de: U20 European Championship - Christoph Lemaitre runs European record , July 24, 2009.
3. ↑ Information on the championship  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Website 20minutes.fr, French  
4. ↑ Information about the EM 2010 in Barcelona ARD website of the Sportschau, accessed in August 2010
5. ↑ IAAF.org: Rudisha Lowers 800m World record again, 1: 41.01; Carter dashes 9.78sec in Rieti ( Memento from August 30, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) (English), August 29, 2010
6. ↑ L'Équipe : Christophe Lemaitre: "Logique" ( Memento of the original from June 11, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (French), June 8, 2011  
7. ↑ Welt Online : Powell runs world best time over 100 meters , June 30, 2011
8. ↑ HDsports.at: Jamaican Festival in the 200 meter final , August 9, 2012
9. ↑ US season loses silver medal , sport1.de from May 14, 2015.
10. ↑ Décret du 30 November 2016 portant promotion et nomination. In: legifrance.gouv.fr. November 30, 2016, accessed February 21, 2020 (French).