Lola Caiazzo

Happy birthday to France’s javelin thrower Lola Caiazzo, who made her first French national championship final in February.

At the Championnats de France de lancers hivernaux in Nice, the winter throws championships, Lola reached the Espoirs javelin final and finished eighth with 38.64m in a six-throw series. Three weeks earlier, on the same Nice runway, she had thrown **40.71m** for second place at the regional long-throws championships and taken the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur U23 silver. Her personal best is 41.18m.

The regional record is where the real story is. Lola has been champion of Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur in the javelin at U23 level and at U20 level, champion of the region in the shot put at U18, and has stacked up departmental titles in Bouches-du-Rhône across both implements year after year since she was fifteen. That is not one good afternoon. That is a thrower who turns up, every season, in every category she has passed through, and keeps winning her patch of France.

The javelin is the throw that gives up its metres most reluctantly. An approach run that has to arrive at exactly the right speed, a block that has to happen at exactly the right instant, and a release angle measured in degrees. A thrower can do nine of the ten things correctly and watch the spear die twenty metres short. Getting to a national final at all means being able to repeat it under pressure, six times in a row, on a February afternoon.

She throws for SCO Sainte-Marguerite in Marseille under Jérémy Sbraggia, and her entire Instagram bio is one word: **Staps**. The French sport science degree. A thrower studying the mechanics of the thing she does.

Joyeux anniversaire, Lola! Tous nos vœux les plus sincères, et que le javelot aille encore plus loin cette année. 🎂🎁🎉🫶🫶🇫🇷