Extract from the article published on the Le Meridional website by Benoit Gilles
After several participations in the Olympic Games, in 470 and laser respectively, the two skippers of the Pôle France Voile de Marseille are starting from scratch, on board the 49er double dinghy, with the Los Angeles 2028 Olympic Games in their sights.
As after every Olympiad, the sailing transfer window was lively after Paris 2024. This was particularly the case on the shores of the Mediterranean, with Camille Lecointre joining SailGP as a tactician and Lou Berthomieu moving from Nacra 17 to 49er FX with Mathilde Lovadina.
But the prize for the biggest surprise goes to two “youngsters” who are still full of enthusiasm: Jean-Baptiste Bernaz, after five consecutive participations in the Olympic Games in laser (5th in Rio 2016), and Jérémie Mion, three Olympic Games in a row in 470 (6th in 2024), have decided to turn everything upside down and join forces. “It’s a bit of a crazy project!” enthuses the latter.
It wasn’t done on a whim. ‘Great friends’ according to Mion (they even went on a boat holiday to Corsica with their partners this summer), the two had come up with this crazy idea as early as 2016. “We had talked about it jokingly before Rio, saying that we would try after the Olympics,” explains Bernaz. ”The timing didn’t work out at the time, we hadn’t finished doing what we had to do in our respective categories.”
