Biathlon: Cyril Burdet talks about Lou Jeanmonnot’s fall
In the early afternoon of Sunday 23 March, the tension was palpable in Oslo-Holmenkollen (Norway). For the twenty-first and final individual race of the 2024/2025 Biathlon World Cup, the suspense in the race for the crystal globe between Lou Jeanmonnot and Franziska Preuss was immense.
La Doubiste, yellow bib on her back, had a 5-point lead over her German rival. The rule was simple: whoever finished ahead of the other would win the trophy. It was then that the two champions fought a final battle of rare intensity… emerging together at the head of the race after the last shot of the winter.
Just as we were heading for a final sprint with the big globe in our sights, Lou Jeanmonnot crashed out 500 metres from the finish, on a bend leading back into the stadium. A stunt in contact with Franziska Preuss cost the Frenchwoman the overall title… and angered her coach Cyril Burdet.
“It’s still a disappointing finale compared to the rest of the season, which has been a superb hard-fought battle”.
“The anger lasted as long as it took to watch the footage again because I was convinced that I’d seen a contact at the moment of the crash [he was right next to the crash, editor’s note], he recalls for Nordic Magazine ten days later. At the time, obviously with the adrenalin pumping and the final looming, there was a lot of excitement and anger. But it didn’t last long.
“The frustration is still there because it’s still a disappointing finish compared to the rest of the season, which has been a superb, hard-fought battle. It’s a shame that it ended like that because, from a sporting point of view, it deserved a different finish. The result might have been the same, but it would have been much nicer if it had ended with a kick or a classic sprint,” he continues.
From this painful episode for the whole of the French team, and particularly for its biathlete, Cyril Burdet remembers “above all sadness for Lou [Jeanmonnot] because she had almost completed a perfect course up to that point. This fall puts a slight damper on what had been a perfectly negotiated final weekend”.
“She’ll go down as one of this season’s key players and I think this finale will go down in the annals. It didn’t turn out to her advantage, but she was the one who pushed Franziska [Preuss] to the limit until the very last moment,” concludes Cyril Burdet.
- Oslo-Holmenkollen: Franziska Preuss wins the mass-start and the crystal globe, Lou Jeanmonnot third after a fall in the finale
- “It’s hard to get more exciting than this”: Franziska Preuss opens up after winning her first crystal globe after a crazy race
- “She closes the door on me in a very conventional way”: Lou Jeanmonnot looks back on the fall that may have cost him the big globe at the Oslo-Holmenkollen mass start
- Oslo-Holmenkollen: Lou Jeanmonnot’s fall in pictures
- Oslo-Holmenkollen: Franziska Preuss’s photo album with the big crystal globe
- Franziska Preuss joins these legends by winning the crystal globe as World Cup winner.
- “A historic race for our sport”: Quentin Fillon-Maillet on the outcome of the Franziska Preuss/Lou Jeanmonnot battle for the big globe
