Triple jumper Hugues Fabrice Zango gives Burkina Faso its first Olympic medal - The Washington Post

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TOKYO — Damned Olympics. They always grab you and get you right in the tear ducts at some point even when you think you’re in the clear. You’re coasting along from day to day, event to event, esoteric sport to esoteric sport, levelheaded, until all of a sudden one day you’re having a little helpless cry over the triple jump.

Crying over the triple jump might be a definition of eccentricity, but then Thursday, some triple jump enthusiasts and budding triple jump enthusiasts gathered in the stands on the shaded side of the Olympic Stadium near the triple jump sand pit. Various coaches and dignitaries at the fan-less Olympics watched from little clumps of their various nationalities, but the heart had eight of them in sight: seven men and one woman in the red-and-green gear of Burkina Faso.

They were there to spot the momentous because Burkina Faso, the landlocked land that used to be Upper Volta until 1984, had a chance for the first medal in the history of the 29th-largest country in Africa with the 19th-largest population (21 million), a country that borders Mali, Niger, Benin, Togo, Ghana and Ivory Coast, a country that doesn’t tend to bask in global spotlight.

“You know, when Fabrice was jumping,” said Jerome Tiendrebeogo, a Burkinabe journalist among the octet, “the first two times, we were, we were very” — and he looked for the right word in English — “afraid.”

He continued: “Because the first time, the second time, jumping . . .”

The first two of the six allotted jumps of Hugues Fabrice Zango sighed at 15.91 meters (about 52 feet, 2 inches) and 16.83 meters (55-3), a shortfall for the 28-year-old Burkinabe from the capital, Ouagadougou, an impressive dude with a growing batch of engineering degrees corralled in northern France. That roused the fear gusher, because Zango typically lands well farther than that, having reached 59-3 indoors earlier this year and 57-11 while winning bronze at the 2019 world championships in Qatar.

Even for a fresh interloper in this corner of the world, there came one of those feelings almost exclusive to the Olympics: triple-jump tension.

A fine thing to ponder about the triple jump is that it exists, and that it helps illustrate the various and whimsical ways humans have tried to cover ground these past 200,000 years, and that it has been around in some form for all the modern Olympics since 1896 and since the ancient Olympics in Greece, with historians having found vague references to it in primeval tweets.

Now this hop, step and jump had hopped, stepped and jumped all the way to the globally warmed heat index of Tokyo in the year 2021, and it held in its vagaries something else exclusive to Olympics: the hopes of one of those countries one sees from Olympiad to Olympiad, still yearning for its first medal.

From among the 12 contestants, Zango’s third jump came.

Could he gather himself to be himself?

He landed, and there it was: 17.47 meters (57-11).

“So it was” — and now Tiendrebeogo searched around for another fitting English word — “magic.”

That pushed Zango into the Olympics’ most delicate position, third place, with three jumps to go for all. He scratched on his fourth jump. He still held third. He got to 17.31 on his fifth. He still held third. Then the eight remaining jumpers had one more chance. Zango still held third. Then six jumpers remained. Zango still held third.

Then sixth-place Necati Er of Turkey, 24, scratched, then ambled to the end of the sand pit, fell to his knees, got up and clapped above his head to thank the smallish audience nearby.

Then came fifth-place Yasser Mohamed Triki of Algeria, also 24, landed and looked somewhat happy. He had reached 17.10. Then came fourth-place Will Claye of the United States, 30, who leaped and looked pleased, and a triple-jump neophyte might think most any number possible.

The electronic board over near the triple jump showed the number: 17.36.

The medalists were set even if their order wasn’t. A country that never had a medal before had a medal even if the color remained uncertain. Zango would have one more try for possibly a silver, standing .10 shy of that. He traveled over the ground in nearly a straight line, landed and looked sort of sullen, a word that did not describe the red and green in the stands, which seemed redder and greener as if bursting to life. The Burkina Faso octet hugged and exulted.

“We’re very happy, very happy,” Tiendrebeogo said, “because it’s the first Olympic medal for our country, Burkina Faso . . . It’s not his best, but it’s enough for us.”

With that, the triple jump had triggered the allergies, or whatever those were, and then Zango came to the interview area beneath the stadium.

“I’m pretty good,” he began in English, and his four listeners laughed at that, but he meant it literally. With a personality both engaging and candid, he did say it had been “history for my country” and that it was “the independence day of my country, so really it’s a double party, you see?”

He envisioned the scene in the capital and said, “Ouagadougou? I think that nobody will sleep this night, because I think now it’s, like, 4 a.m. So nobody really will sleep. They will do a party all the night. And I think that when I’ll go back, we will go to do a good party, yeah.”

“I don’t know why, but this Olympics was really hard for me. And I wasn’t able to produce my best, but I really give all I could give. So I don’t know why the form wasn’t there. This makes me a bit sad. Yeah, because all the season I was pretty regular to beyond 17.60 really easy, and today it was really hard for me to jump even 17 meters. I cannot explain that. I will take time to analyze why that happened in this Olympics and to be ready for other challenge.”

Maybe with time, that bronze would look better.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know.”

He proceeded to the French interviews, then to the news conference, a Burkina Faso flag draped around his shoulders, gold medalist Pedro Pichardo of Portugal (17.98) and silver medalist Zhu Yaming of China (17.57) to his right.

Then a question brought Zango to the future, a Paris Olympics just three years away from now and two hours and change away from Zango’s current residence in Bethune up near Lille and the Belgian border.

“I’m doing a Ph.D. in electrical engineering, and I finish next year,” said the man with two engineering Master’s degrees already, and he soon added, “I try to push to continue to train hard for the Paris Olympics in order to make history for my country.”

He said, “Now we have a bronze medal.”

And he said, “We need a silver and a gold.”

Good grief, that triple jump in Paris might wreak some blubbering.

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Triple jumper Hugues Fabrice Zango gives Burkina Faso its first Olympic medal - The Washington Post
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