She was born in Lisbon and represented Portugal in gymnastics before France captivated her when she was 12 years old. Pandemic pushed her into the pool and into the mortals at a height of 20 meters.
Madeleine Bayon made history in Paris with a 20-meter jump into the Seine River on June 25th. If for the French she is “the first French woman” to compete in the Red Bull Cliff Diving World Series, for the Portuguese she is still an unknown, despite being born in Lisbon in 1997 and having represented Portugal in a World Gymnastics Championships.
“I’m also French, so it was amazing. I had dreamed of this since I saw a Red Bull jumps event in Paris. I was a little scared, but I trained so, so hard, that I was prepared,” the 25-year-old athlete told PP, who did her first race a month before this jump and therefore had (and has) little experience, when she jumped into the Seine with the Eiffel Tower as a witness.
After a flight of 20 meters (for men it is 27) in 3 seconds, Madeleine still dived four to five meters on impact. The images taken by Red Bull photographers show her smiling after emerging: “I was happy. I felt very supported. If the jump is not perfect and I don’t go into the water straight, it’s bound to hurt. The technical part is very important, as well as the physical part. You enter the water at 80 or 85 kilometers per hour in less than a second and the impact can send you to the hospital. You have to contract your legs, torso, groin, and abdomen at the right moment. And not forgetting the psychological preparation. I need to be okay with myself to face the jump. To think that I’m scared and it’s too high, but that I can do it and I’m prepared. That is also trained.”
Daughter of French parents who moved to Lisbon because they loved the city, Madeleine was forced by her parents to do a sport and her choice fell on gymnastics. It was at the Ginásio Clube Português that she fell in love with acrobatic gymnastics and represented Portugal at the 2010 World Championships in Poland, alongside Vanessa Mendes and Mariana Fernandes. They came in fifth place.
She lived in Portugal until she was 12. Then life forced her to make a decision that was too cruel for her age. Her parents split up and she had to choose between going with her mother to Belgium or staying in Lisbon with her father, “I didn’t really want to choose my parents and I ended up going to France because of gymnastics. For my parents it was important that I continue studying, but gymnastics already required five hours a day. When the French gymnastics federation found out about my dual nationality, they offered me a full scholarship at a school where I could train on time, and I went there,” she told, explaining that this is how she became a French athlete. She was warned about the implications of her choice: she knew she could change flag once, but could never compete in the gymnastics events being Portuguese.
She was a flywheel – in the language of acrobatic gymnastics it means one who is the smallest to be lifted and does pirouettes and somersaults in the air – and so the career had limited time and weight. When he went to university he adhered to the zero sport policy. She studied management in London and gained a freedom she hadn’t had, which then took her to Madrid, where she currently works at Amazon.
It was when I was telecommuting because of the covid-19 pandemic that I decided to take up a sport “so as not to go crazy”: “I thought that for a retired sportsperson like me, the pool could be a good ally. I joined an adult class in a pool in Madrid, where the instructor happened to be the coach of some athletes from the Red Bull circuit and the Spanish national team. Since I always loved mortals, I thought it must be cool to do mortals into the water. Before I knew it I was already training mortals with top athletes and they were challenging me. I took it as a joke, for me it was like telling a young girl starting to play tennis that she could enter the main board of Roland Garros [laughs].”
But the training routine began to bore her, and after six months she worked up the courage to ask her coach a question, “Do you think if I train really, really hard, I can get to a Red Bull level?” The answer was positive and Madeleine plunged headlong into training. In May she made her World Cup debut with a 19th place finish.
After that, the invitation to be a guest athlete at a Red Bull event was a matter of passing the casting. She had to send videos of her jumps at 20 meters. For this, she went to Austria to do progression training in a pool where you jump meter by meter to a maximum of 18 meters. Then he was in the USA for a week to train and record at least four different jumps at 20 meters. She sent them to the Red Bull team, whose main selection criteria is to see if the jumps do not endanger the athlete himself. She was then invited to the Paris leg, the second of six events on the circuit.
Now, next is the World Championship in Japan and the desire/goal of being one of the eight permanent athletes on the Red Bull circuit. This is despite the fact that the prize money from the show jumping competitions is not enough to live exclusively from this activity, unless she can always stand on the podium. For now, she still has to take a vacation to compete.
