Childhood

Like most children in the popular Yacoub El Mansour district, Nezha was fascinated by the practice of sport in this stronghold of the capital's stars. Coming from a modest family, Nezha Bidouane cherished the same dream and was ready to sacrifice everything to one day become a celebrity. Her agility and natural suppleness would help the determined young girl she was, always smiling, to attract the attention of the coaches of a gymnastics school that she would join with the help and support of Hajja Fatima, her mother.

But fate would decide otherwise in 1986, since her high school colleagues would attract her to a prospecting test at the Prince Moulay Abdallah sports complex in Rabat to undergo tests with the goal of being recruited as a young hopeful athlete. This is how the same girls, and notably Miss Mounkabi Bouchra, would also bring her with them to sign an athlete's licence at the Olympic Moroccan, a club she never left.

Career

Dominating all national competitions, she joined the National Athletics Institute in 1991, directed at the time by Akka Samsam Lahcen, general director and technical director of the Federation, and Aziz Daouda, technical director of the school. She would be entrusted to Sindaoui Mohamed as a coach, and he would in fact be her second coach after Said Belamgharia, who had guided her first steps within the framework of the pilot athletics school of the Prince Moulay Abdallah sports complex in Rabat, created and supervised by Fatima Elfaquir, the first Moroccan African champion in the 400 metres hurdles.

This is how Nezha would begin a career that would gradually become professional. After her first titles as a junior and her first national and Arab records in this category, on the recommendation of Sahere Abdelaziz, who would become her husband, Nezha would join Aziz Daouda as a coach and definitively specialise in the 400 metres hurdles. She left him on the advice of Abderrahmane Medkouri at the beginning of 1993 to join Nawal El Moutawakel in Casablanca, but this break only lasted a few months; Nezha quickly returned to Rabat to join the one who would coach her until the end of her career.

After multiple titles at the Mediterranean, Arab, and African levels and some three years on the international circuit and a first surgical intervention on the Achilles tendon, Nezha would win her first world title in Athens, where she won the gold medal in the 400 metres hurdles at the 1997 World Championships.

During the 1998 World Athletics Cup in Johannesburg, she was a few hundredths of a second away from the world record in the 400 m hurdles with a time of 52.90 seconds, establishing a new record for this competition despite the handicap of running in the 8th lane. In 1999 in Seville, she was deprived of the world title in favour of the Cuban Daimí Pernía. Decided by a photo finish with this rival of a day, Nezha is still convinced she was the first, reinforced in this by a left-hand photo finish image that she keeps preciously, the reservations then presented by the Moroccan delegation not having been able to change things.

In 2000 at the Sydney Olympic Games, while she held the best world performance, she only finished third, handicapped at the last minute by a health problem. This was only a postponement, since in 2001 in Edmonton, Nezha would put everyone in agreement by winning the world title again, confirming that she was indeed the best specialist in the event from 1997 to 2001, since after this second title she decided to end her career and give birth on 16 August to the one who would be her first child, Yacine, whose first name had been chosen by Mohammed VI, King of Morocco. On 18 September 2007, Nezha would give birth to her second child, for whom His Majesty would choose the first name Yassir.

Nezha would have contributed enormously to the 400 metres hurdles event in terms of technique to be considered one of the best technicians of this event, being considered the one who best succeeded in the distribution of effort over the entire distance.

In September 2007, the British newspaper The Times ranked her among the 100 best athletes of the World Championships. In April 2008, she was selected among the best athletes in history in Africa and received from the hands of Mr. Hamad Malboum Kalkaba a prestigious trophy during the first Gala evening of its kind on the African continent, thus appearing on the continental Hall of Fame.

In August 2011, she was appointed assessor and spokesperson for the Mohammed VI Foundation of Sports Champions.

Palmarès

2000 at the 2000 Summer Olympic Games, she was a bronze medallist
1999 at the World Athletics Championships, she was a silver medallist
1997 at the World Athletics Championships, she was a gold medallist
2001 at the World Athletics Championships, she was a gold medallist