3 questions to Antoine Questel

03/01/2024

For many years one of the best slalom sailors in France and in the world, Antoine Questel is retiring at the start of 2024. At the age of 39, with 20 years dedicated to top-level windsurfing, including 6 French champion titles and a lot of time spent in the world's top 10, FRA-99 talks to Windsurfjournal.com about this decision, which was nevertheless difficult to take...

Windsurfjournal.com: What motivated your decision to retire from the PWA World Tour in July after the PWA event in Gran Canaria? You said in your announcement: "I didn't feel like I belonged there any more".
Antoine Questel: The decision was indeed taken just after the Grand Canaria event, but I started to question myself from the start of the PWA event at Lake Garda. However, I was feeling competitive on my equipment in training long before the deadlines started. Alexandre Cousin, with whom I often train, told me that he'd rarely seen me so motivated. I was fast on the water. But in the first heat and from the very first pool, I couldn't find the right strategic reflexes to counter my opponents. I didn't know how to respond, which left me with a very bitter feeling at the finish. As a result of my questioning, I've come to realise that my absences during the winter training sessions in Tenerife with the top competitors didn't allow me to improve my tactical and strategic skills on this new sport, the foil. The event went ahead, and I was rubbing my hands together, thinking that the season had only just begun and there were going to be the fin slalom events in the Canaries! And then there was the big disappointment when, at the end of the first day, I realised that I wasn't going to make it with my 6.7 and my little 63 wide board in 25 knots of wind... To conclude, I felt completely out of touch with the reality of things. I felt out of place. It really wasn't easy for me to make this decision because it was difficult for my partners to accept that I was stopping in the middle of the season, but sometimes you have to listen to yourself.

WJ: The arrival of foiling has totally reshuffled the cards. How do you see this development in top-level sport?
AQ: Foiling is a new sport. The best fin sailors of the past can still be the best foil sailors, but there are quite a few parameters, including race strategy, that have to be readapted. Your reflexes on the water and your decision-making aren't as radical as with a fin, and you can't attack in the same way at all. You need less experience to be at the top of the rankings because you can't do what you want in a straight line or even in a jibe. If you go fast and know how to race a minimum, you have a chance of doing well fairly quickly. That's also why there are some new faces, unknown on the PWA tour before, but who nevertheless reach the top of the rankings on an event they decide to do in the year between 2 iQFOil competitions. The foil has finally opened up the game compared with the days of the fin slalom, which was practised for years and gave a lot of advantage to experience at the end. This is probably going to happen again in the years to come for foiling, because at the moment everyone is still learning how to use it in competition.

WJ: You were among the world's best in slalom for a long time. If there was just one memory, what would it be?
AQ: I have one memory of a podium finish in a PWA event in South Korea in 2012 that has stayed with me for a long time. It was my first big sporting performance on the PWA circuit and there are undoubtedly many other memories that will stay with me forever!