Hugues Fabrice Zango wasn’t sure where his mom was when he leapt to triple jump gold at the World Athletics Championships in Budapest on Monday night. She had travelled all the way from Burkina Faso to the Hungarian capital to support her son with the rest of their family but was too nervous to watch.
Speaking after the competition where he produced a fifth-round leap of 17.64m to claim Africa’s first ever world championships triple jump gold, the beaming Zango explained: “I just want to share my medal with my family who travelled from Burkina to come. It is the first ever athletics competition they have attended with me. But my mom, I think that she stayed at the hotel, she [is too nervous] to look at me, watch me when I jump.”
The 30-year-old said he was unlikely to get any sleep on Monday night – and the scenario was likely to be the same in his home country.
“It’ll be just crazy in Burkina Faso, I’m sure that nobody will sleep tonight. When I go back it will just be amazing, happy, crazy. When I go back I will be like a king there.”
Zango admitted he had been thrown off his game when Jamaica’s teen sensation Jaydon Hibbert, who was among the favourites for the title, had pulled out of Monday night’s competition with a hamstring injury after the first round.
Zango’s coach Teddy Tamgho, who claimed the world triple jump title for France in 2013, explained: “It was a strange competition because the young Jamaican guy was hurt at the first attempt and it was a bit difficult for Zango to refocus because he wanted a big battle.
“When he saw the competition easing he had some trouble to fix his first four attempts. But after the fourth attempt, I told him: ‘OK man just relax, just enjoy, and just one jump is enough to win the competition.’ He looked at me like, yes I’m about to do it and he did it. That’s why I’m happy.”
Zango added: “It’s never easy when you have a plan in your head for a competition like World Championships and something changes, sometimes you need some time to try to fix your objective.
“When I was in the warm-up I was on fire, I had like a lion in me, but after this when I saw the Jamaican was injured… I had to struggle against myself and it was not easy.”
Zango overcome that struggle however and emerged with the gold.
“He’s stepping up, now he’s on top of the world,” said Tamgho. “He’s got to keep his strength for sure because next year we’re going to have the Olympic Games and that will be very hard because I think that [Olympic champion] Pedro Pichardo and the young Jamaican guy will be stronger, the competition will be stronger. We have to be more clever than ever to be able to do the same that we did today.”
