MARSEILLE: Julie Paturau initially dismissed the idea of making the Olympics when fellow kiteboarder Jean de Falbaire suggested she step up to foiling and join him in representing Mauritius.
"I told him: 'I'll learn, but I don't think we are going to make it to the Olympics, it's in four years'," she told Reuters.
She was wrong and both are now at the sport's debut in the Games, sailing in the women's and men's events on Sunday.
Paturau, who had tried a long list of sports including skateboarding, tennis, kiteboarding freestyle, swimming and riding, says that foiling kiteboarding is by far the toughest.
"I started learning and it was by far the hardest sport I've ever done," Paturau said of the fastest event in the Olympics.
De Falbaire's idea had been for the pair to race together in a relay team, but this format was not adopted for the Olympics, which opted for separate women's and men's events instead.
Paturau said learning to foil was "very scary" with the combination of gear, speed and crashes making this version of the sport very tricky compared to traditional non-foiling ones.
"It was like learning from zero. You think: 'you've got a sail, you've got a board, it can't be that different', but it is very different," Paturau said on a bus on the Avenue du Prado.
The last person to represent Mauritius in sailing at the Games, said Paturau, was her mother, who competed in windsurfing in Barcelona in 1992 and is with her daughter in Marseille.
"We were super stoked. She was the one pushing me and saying: 'Even if you are last in the race, it doesn't matter. You need to be the first African to get your ticket and then you are there'," Paturau said.-- Reuters