Wilfrid Forgues

A junior world champion in 1987, Wilfrid Forgues went on to forge a hugely successful partnership with Franck Adisson that saw them regularly win medals in the Canadian pairs slalom category in the years that straddled the 20th and 21st centuries.

Forgues and Adisson were ten times champions of France and four times World Championship gold medallist but the highlight of their career came with victory at the Ocoee Whitewater Center during the 1996 Summer Olympics. The duo had already won bronze at Barcelona and would return to compete, without medal success, at the Sydney Games.

Retiring shortly after the 2000 Olympics he set up his own computer company and later accepted the post of President of his region’s canoe federation. In 2016, by then married and the father of two teenaged children, Forgues decided to reveal his struggle with gender identity to his family, separated with his wife and began to live his life as a woman. Two years later he revealed to the newspaper L’Équipe that he had begun to take female hormones and was due to undergo gender reassignment surgery in Spring 2019.