Considering all the attention lavished on football and cycling, it is salutary to consider that two of athletics most recent champions were converts from these sports. IAU 100km champion, Yanick Djouadi FRA, and European 50km Race Walk champion, Yohan Diniz FRA, both had ambitions in other directions before converting to athletics and discovering where their talents lay. 

Djouadi was destined to be a cyclist and was on the point of turning professional when an accident laid him low for a year and a half. By the time he had come off his sickbed he considered himself too old for cycling at 27 and opted for distance running. That was in 2000. Six years later, at the age of 33, he was proclaimed World 100km Champion.

For Diniz, the catalyst for change was his studies. Propelled by his family into football, he took time out to study for a diploma in wine-making, but on concluding the course made the switch to Race Walking. Like Djouadi, he was unusual in that he embarked on his new sport late, in his case at the age of 22. But in a mirror image of his compatriot, he too has triumphed in a short space of time. This summer, at the age of 28, he clinched the European title in Gothenburg.

Both men could be said to have confounded received wisdom in that they started late and have succeeded in reaching the top of their sport without an early background in the sport. Djouadi, however, explains his success in ultra-distance running as a consequence of the endurance he received as a cyclist: “Cycling helped me develop my endurance,” he says.

For Diniz, who had started out in athletics before taking up football, it was a fascination with Race Walking that brought him back to the fold. Though still regarded as young for long distances, Diniz has triumphed in double quick time at short as well as the long event. Within two years of taking up the sport, he had joined the French elite and is now national record holder at 50km, as well as holding the 20km record and setting the national best for 5000m. 

An oddity for both men, apart from the coincidence of sharing the same initials and nationality, is that neither expected to triumph. If there is a cliché to be broken here, it is that old saying that winners want to win more than anybody else.  Djouadi was hoping for a top ten finish, while Diniz thought maybe fifth was a possibility given his times. Both were equally taken aback by their titles.

“This has surpassed all my hopes,” said Diniz with the gold medal around his neck. “My sole ambition was to finish the race since I was disqualified in Helsinki last year (IAAF World Championships)”.  Djouadi was equally stunned: “It’s a real surprise. I was confident after my third place in the Europeans and I wanted to beat my personal best, but I was aiming at a place in the first ten. There’s always the dream of a podium finish, but first! It’s incredible.”

For Djouadi, his title was a powerful vindication of the switch of sports: “It is like a revenge on sport, for what happened to me. After my illness, I issued a challenge to myself. What I did not succeed in doing in cycling, I have achieved in athletics.”

Diniz regards his title as “just recompense for hours of work and sacrifice.”  Though he does not earn a living directly from athletics, he is in charge of a youth section in his club at Reims which makes training accessible. He hopes his medal will bring with it a suitable sponsor’s contract and has been in talks with France’s national railway company, SNCF. Djouadi, meanwhile, has set himself up in a surgical equipment business with his brother and can choose when he trains. 

Neither event is in the media spotlight, but Diniz hopes his medal will persuade others to dream in the way he did when he first saw the walkers in the Paris-Colmar go past his doorstep. Djouadi’s choice of event was more accidental in that he only took part in the French 100km championships in 2004 to help out a friend and won it. For both men, though, it was the radical change of direction to athletics that propelled them on the road to recognition.

Michael Butcher for the IAAF