On the scales of the Olympic Marina in Marseille,

Impossible to miss the finalists of the IQ Foil, the name of the new windsurf boards, on the beach of the Olympic Marina in Marseille with their shoulders as imposing as their foil. A novelty for these Paris 2024 Olympics after the abandonment of the RSX class at the end of those in Tokyo in 2021, and the introduction of this new IQ class, and boards equipped with foil.

The arrival of this mast that descends underwater with a front wing and a rear stabilizer, which we call a “plane”, has completely revolutionized the discipline. And profoundly modified the bodies of the athletes who practice it. “It’s the new foil support that requires enormous power, it’s purely physical. We have a plane that moves underwater, the faster we go, the more the plane wants to take off and get out of the water. If it goes out, we fall and stop. The more weight we put to force it underwater, the better it is, it’s purely physical”, says the bronze medalist in RSX in Rio, Pierre Lecoq.

IQ, “extreme high”

A novelty for these athletes, when the sailors on boats are much thinner. It would also be funny to put Jean-Baptiste Bernaz, from the ILCA class, the small lasers, side by side with Nicolas Goyard, the French representative of the IQ, unfortunately eliminated before the final played this Saturday. This change of class has led to an explosion in the weight of the athletes of almost 25kg, on average, for an average size of 100kg for the men.

Charline Picon, bronze medalist in 49er FX on Friday, with her teammate Sarah Steyaert, had simply decided to give up windsurfing after this change in regulations because of the need to gain weight. In the women’s category, the minimum to perform is around 67 kg, while Charline weighed 57 after her gold medal in Rio and silver in Tokyo, in the RSX class. And after struggling to get to 61 kg, she preferred to give up to simply change disciplines.

So it was Hélène Noesmoen who took up the torch in the RSX class, standing at 1.69 metres tall and weighing 73 kg. Which didn’t stop her from being eliminated in the quarter-finals on Saturday morning. “It’s true that when you see the guys, they’re really strong, but it was mainly a problem for the boys, more than for the girls,” she said. “With the RSX, we were a bit at the very low end, and with the IQ, at the very high end. The boys really went to that extreme, to the point of forgetting about endurance a bit because it’s still a complete sport.”

“He was disgusting!”

A radical change in the space of six months between the end of the Tokyo Games, and the abandonment of the RSX class, and the start of the new IQ Foil competitions. “It’s not like rugby where you know you need an imposing size that you build up over time, here it was super violent,” he says.

With a recommended diet of 30g of protein every three hours, and therefore five meals based on steak or protein powder, per day. And the damage that it causes: “The image is almost you weigh yourself in the morning on the scale, and you say to yourself “cool I gained 1 kg, I’m going to go faster”.

“I didn’t feel like an athlete anymore”

Of course, the competition with the French selection for the 2024 Paris Olympics, “the monster Nicolas Goyard” in his own words, played a role. But he no longer recognized himself at all in this race for weight, he who went from 73 to 89 kg, to the point of ending his career. “I felt that I had reached the limit switch. I didn’t necessarily feel good, I no longer felt like an athlete, with this priority of gaining weight. I reached a stage where I no longer felt healthy, not to mention the fact that many people barely recognized me. I didn’t really take it well and I saturated!” he testifies.

The IQ Foil class is slowly becoming aware that this race for weight has its limits, and is thinking about reducing the size of the sails by 1m2. In order to limit the speed and avoid having to lean too much on the scale. A problem that is just as present in foil kitesurfing, whose competitions begin this Sunday on the Olympic Marina in Marseille.