“She will be everywhere with me,” Agbégnénou told AFP of her daughter Athéna. “I have the right to have my daughter and my companion wherever I wish”.
Everywhere, that is to say at the athletes’ hotel, in the air-conditioned stands of the Ali Bin Hamad Al Attiyah Arena, or even in the warm-up room, where judokas, coaches, sparring partners swarm every day and members of the staff of the teams involved.
Absent from the last edition of the Worlds due to maternity leave, the double Olympic champion from Tokyo, already crowned with five world crowns, signs in Qatar her big return on the planetary scene in preparation for the Olympic Games at home in a little more than a month. year.
A baby in a warm-up room? A first !
When her pregnancy was announced in February, the 30-year-old judoka immediately made an appointment for those in Paris in 2024.
In Qatar, she considers herself capable of going for a medal even if her post-maternity recovery has not been easy with a knee injury and above all a conflict with the French Federation about her kimono.
This episode now behind her, she arrives in Doha focused on the competition, which she begins on Wednesday in -63 kg, and on her daughter Athena, after a first test carried out at the Grand Slam in Tel Aviv in February where everything happened in a “fluid” way, she assures.
Like her, other female judokas have recently resumed their careers after becoming mothers. The Dutch Kim Polling, 32, or the Briton Nekoda Smythe-Davis, 30, also present in Doha, for example have young children.
But Agbégnénou is currently the only one to bring her daughter to the warm-up room. “It’s a first,” she says. “Before, I think we weren’t allowed to go to the warm-up room before the age of three. I think it can be good because it can open the door (for others).
“I can only thank the international federation for agreeing to have a baby in the warm-up room,” she continues. “That way if I have to breastfeed, Athena can come, she can be there. Now, as she is growing up a bit, she will also be able to be in the stands, but she at least has the possibility of coming to the warm-up room if I feel the need”.
“We show the way”
An unprecedented situation that arouses the admiration of her teammates. “I think she’s a very courageous woman,” says Blandine Pont, a member of the Red Star de Champigny like her.
“She’s a great champion with a big mind and since she became a mother, it’s hard, it’s difficult, you can see it, you can’t hide it. She knows it too, but I just find that she is doubling up in courage and it’s beautiful to see. It makes you want to, it’s admirable”.
Like Agbégnénou, Nekoda Smythe-Davis, mother of a one-and-a-half-year-old little Ryia, regularly documents her return to the tatami on social networks. “If things aren’t seen openly, people believe they can’t be done,” she said recently in an interview with the International Federation.
“Once we are seen making these choices, other women who want to start a family will see that it is a possibility. We show what our body is really capable of. It also gives me the motivation to succeed. We show the way”.