Raphaël Beaugillet

IDEC SPORT partner of Raphaël Beaugillet, the parasports cyclist

Crédits photos © Ange Rouzaud

IDEC SPORT embarks on a new adventure: cycling. But this is no ordinary story, because IDEC SPORT is backing the visually impaired cyclist Raphaël Beaugillet.
After Marie-Amélie Le Fur, IDEC SPORT signed another partnership in December 2020 with a parasports athlete, the cyclist Raphaël Beaugillet. He rides in tandem with François Pervis, and the pair are aiming for a medal at the Tokyo Olympic Games this summer.

Late onset blindness
Raphaël Beaugillet wasn’t born with his disability. It was when he was 20 years old that his sight started to fail him owing to a degenerative genetic disease when he was launching a career in the construction sector. Raphaël has not lost his sight completely but it is now blurred. He lives in a permanent fog, as he puts it himself. Because of his visual impairment, his whole life was disrupted and his activities came to a sudden halt.

Pedalling to take things forwards
It took four years of adaptation to enable Raphaël Beaugillet to make his transition and accept his disability. Of a sporting disposition, Raphaël has built his life around cycling. To begin with, it wasn’t his number one goal, but aged 25 he decided to put all he had into this new passion. After having divided his time between mountain biking and road cycling, he decided in 2018 to specialise in track cycling.

Fully focussed on the Olympics.
After his beginnings on the track, Raphaël Beaugillet soon joined the France parasports team. At the end of 2019, the Federation paired him with the highly experienced François Pervis, seven-times track racing world champion. The tandem functions well between the parasports athlete and his ‘pilot’. For them, the cancellation of the games in 2020 wasn’t a disaster, as this allowed them to get to know each other better, and it’s true that you have to be properly attuned to make a success of tandem track racing. The pair is now about to tackle the “kilometre” distance at the Olympic Games. After a standing start, you have to do four laps of the velodrome as fast as possible.

The tandem has qualified for the Games
The Beaugillet/Pervis pair has just won three categories at the France 2021 championships, on 13 and 14 February, in Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines: pursuit, 200m and kilometre. The first two disciplines are not proposed for the Olympics, but the two cyclists have just completed the kilometre race in 1min 1sec and 2 hundredths, that’s to say half a second faster than required to qualify for the Tokyo games. Raphaël Beaugillet is currently training every day and doing monthly sessions with just one goal in mind: to excel for one minute on the great day and win an Olympic medal.