BUDAPEST – If their lives depended on it, the bet here is that 99 out of 100 Americans – maybe most Europeans, too, for that matter – could not find Burkina Faso on the map.
The capital of Burkina Faso, which is in west Africa and until two generations ago was called Upper Volta, is Ouagadougou, and as of these 2023 world track and field championships its most famous citizen is Hugues Fabrice Zango, who is not only a star athlete but also one small step away from getting his Ph.D. in electrical engineering at a university in France.
The guy is handsome, beyond intelligent and articulate in both French and English. He is destined to be a star at the Paris 2024 Games. Sportswriters are not supposed to say these sorts of things but, after talking with him for well over a year, here we go: he is a fundamentally decent human being who cares about our broken world. His country is in a bad way. He knows this. He knows, too, that what he represents, especially now, after these championships, is the one thing his country needs more than anything.
Hope.
Fabrice Zango is a triple jumper. He had won bronze medals (2019 worlds, 2020/1 Olympics) and silver (2022 worlds). On Monday, here, he won gold, jumping 17.64.
It was the country’s first-ever world athletics championships gold. And the first gold in triple jump for any African nation. The celebration in Burkina Faso, a nation that over the past year has seen considerable turmoil – it is on.
At 11:57 p.m. Budapest time Monday, the nation’s sports minister texted Fabrice Zango: “You have congratulations from the president, from the [prime minister} and all the government and all the people. Champion forever!”
A minute later, the president, Captain Ibrahim Traoré took to the platform formerly known as Twitter:
Fabrice Zango holding a photo of the presidential tweet
At 7:50 a.m. Wednesday, another message from the sports minister: “Bonjour champion. We want to organize a call with the president this morning. Call me asap.”
Traoré seized power in a coup last September. He removed a lieutenant colonel who in January had toppled the country’s last elected president.
Burkina Faso has been rocked by a rebel insurgency that has claimed thousands of lives since spreading from neighboring Mali in 2015.
“It’s not easy in my country right now,” Fabrice Zango said. “They need some light.”
It would be easy for someone who mostly has been based at a university in Europe the past few years, especially now that he has won gold at the worlds, particularly with a Ph.D. dissertation to defend coming up on October 3, to stay away from Ouagadougou. Not Hugues Fabrice Zango. He said he will be there in early September, to see the people, to show them his medal.
“It’s an honor for me to be there,” he said, “to go back to my country, to present my medal, to show it is possible to really bring our country from nowhere to the world.
“It’s important for me to show myself physically. To see me on television is not the same. I’m organizing some things so the people can see me. To keep hope. We need to maintain it. Then the people can be more confident for the challenge.”
You want a challenge?
This is a guy, now 30 years old, who while racking up medals at the worlds and at the Tokyo Games all but completed his Ph.D. at the Université de Reims in northern France. His thesis title: “high performance electric machine with external rotator and integrated converter for application in harsh environments,” likely mining and other industrial applications.
On Monday to Thursday, he would work at the lab.
From Friday to Sunday, he trained, with the French former triple jump champion, Teddy Tamgho.
After Tokyo, the two of them set out a plan to, as Fabrice Zango put it, “go to my mind to another level.”
The thinking:
At the elite level, everyone is strong physically. The winner is the mentally toughest.
He and Tamgho spent literally hour upon hour analyzing the other jumpers for patterns. They knew, for instance, that the two Cubans who took silver and bronze Monday, Lazaro Martinez and Cristian Napoles, were almost always burned out after Round Four.
Martinez went 17.41 in Round One, Napoles 17.40 in Round Four.
Meanwhile, Jaydon Hibbert of Jamaica, who had the season’s best jump, 17.87, pulled out. He ran through the pit on his first attempt, clutching his hamstring.
Before Round Five, Tamgho said to Fabrice Zango, my guy, relax, this is your meet now. Why stress? There’s zero. Do your thing.
Teddy Tamgho after his pupil’s victory
“Just enjoy,” Tamgho said he told him. “Just one jump is enough to enjoy your goal.”
This year,” Fabrice Zango said, “I was really consistent jumping 17.6. It is easy for me. I know exactly how to contract my muscles to jump 17.6. When he told me that, I said, what, I just have to jump 17.6 to win. Just relax.”
Just like that – 17.64.
“I told him, ‘I knew you could win this championship one day,’” Tamgho said. “And now it’s like a gift – a gift for all these years, these years of working, the push, of pushing.”
A double gift, really.
“This is something I was dreaming of since the start of my Ph.D.,” Fabrice Zango said. “Is it possible to combine the two projects? Is it possible to finally be a world champion? Getting medals, I did it. But being a world champion and a doctor – it’s something crazy.”
So crazy: “It is happiness more than you can imagine.”