HIBAPRESS-RABAT
Champion Jawad ABDELMOULA has qualified for the Paris 2024 Olympic Games in triathlon, in the men’s individual event.
This is the second qualification of the Moroccan triathlon for the Olympic Games after the Tokyo Games in 2020.
Jawad Abdelmoula is the new triathlon sensation in Morocco. At 28, he won his first World Cup victory this year and is aiming for the 2024 Paris Olympics.
Although Abdelmoula has been putting in a series of performances, it has only been four years since he really started doing triathlon. He first practiced swimming, then running, with a record of 3 min 50 s 98 over 1,500 m and 14 min 44 s 95 over 5,000 m.
It was only shortly before his 25th birthday that he added cycling and discovered his skills in the combined three-discipline event.
Before devoting himself fully to triathlon, Jawad Abdelmoula worked as a firefighter in the city of Rennes, Brittany. He had to reconcile his full-time profession with his training load, a very tight schedule. Because to reach the international level, he had to train about twenty hours a week, while the best add about ten more. This is a considerable volume, given the nature of his former profession where physical capacities are greatly in demand.
However, he recorded his first major World Cup success while he was still a firefighter.
But since the beginning of 2022, he has been a professional triathlete and can train full time with his club in Poissy, where the French Dorian Coninx and Léonie Périault, bronze medalists at Tokyo 2020 in the mixed relay, are also licensed.
After a second place at the Troutbeck African Cup in September 2021 and a fourth at the Asian Cup in Tashkent in early October, Jawad Abdelmoula made history in the Republic of Korea with a World Cup victory. It was in Tongyeong, on October 30, 2021. He won in particular ahead of the young rising triathlon stars Alessio Crociani (ITA), born in 2001, and Sergio Baxter Cabrera (ESP), born in 2000 and currently 14th in the world.
A few weeks later, he followed up with a victory in the African Cup and the Asian Cup, in November, then a victory in the European Cup in April 2022.
He shone again internationally with a first podium on the prestigious World Triathlon Championship Series (WTCS) circuit. In Hamburg in July 2022, Abdelmoula offered the first WTCS podium to Morocco with his third place ahead of world number 1 Léo Bergere.
Currently ranked 20th in the world and first in Africa, Jawad Abdelmoula has made the Paris 2024 Olympic Games a priority. The triathlete born in Angers to Moroccan parents hopes to shine on the Olympic course of the Olympic Games in France.
To qualify, he will have to shine on the World Cup and WTCS circuit over the next two years. He currently sits 10th in the Olympic standings, whose points collection period began on May 27, 2022.
If he continues to progress and given his new status as a professional triathlete, it is very likely that Jawad Abdelmoula will be present on July 30, 2024 at the Alexandre III bridge, where the next Olympic triathlon will begin.
