Victor Wembanyama (1/5): before the Wemby phenomenon and "Wembamania", there was Victor

" "I think everyone should be the main character in their own story. Life is all we have, so there's no way to waste it ," the young man once said. Victor could have been a kid like many others, a kid from the Parisian suburbs, the western suburbs, rather quiet and well-off.

He was born in Le Chesnay, in the Yvelines department, a stone's throw from the Palace of Versailles. It was there that he grew up, quickly, with his sister Eve, his younger brother Oscar, and his parents, both high-level athletes. His father, Félix, is a former athlete, a triple jump specialist, originally from Congo. His mother, Élodie, is a former basketball player, a member of the French national team, who became a children's coach in Le Chesnay.

That's when Victor bursts in, discovers the orange ball. It's not a question of size, no, not yet, it's just obvious. Victor is already unique. At 5 years old, everyone thinks he's twice that size. Victor is tall, but not only that. He stands out quite quickly, as his first coach at Chesnay, Emmanuel Savarasse, remembers: " He was already doing things that 11-12 year-olds could do, except that he was eight years old. "

A jack-of-all-trades, he loves basketball, but not only that. Between two Lego Star Wars assemblies, Victor plays other sports, and his thing is soccer. At 10 years old, little Victor is already very big. He's a goalkeeper and he's already giving three heads to the little kids who serve as his teammates. Victor loves soccer, but there's basketball, NBA games that he sometimes watches on not-so-legal sites, or the highlights, first thing in the morning when he wakes up. He dreams of America, and on the court, things are starting to get serious. Le Chesnay has become too small, so Victor is going to go 15 kilometers north, to Nanterre, a basketball stronghold in western Paris.

Towards At 12-13 years old, he says, he understood what it meant to be a top-level player. " I understood that I was capable of it and that if I was capable of it, I had to do it. " At JSF Nanterre, they immediately understood that there weren't a hundred Victors entering the gyms every week.

"In basketball, being tall doesn't always mean being precocious and superior. He's a truly unique case."

Frédéric Donnadieu, trainer at JSF Nanterre

Frédéric Donnadieu, then a trainer at the club, had the impression of seeing Harry Potter, the chosen one, arrive: "At the time I called my father to tell him: 'I have just trained a youngster and I will never train another like that'" .

The sky is already his limit. Wemby is a rough gem, but not quartz, a diamond, like Youkounkoun [name of the fictional diamond presented as "the biggest in the world" in the film Le Corniaud ]. He played his first professional match at 15, wearing the Nanterre jersey. He was a top prospect at 17. Then he joined the legend Tony Parker at Asvel, before returning near Paris, to Levallois under the orders of Vincent Collet, then national coach, to best prepare for his takeoff towards the NBA. But this whole story is his own, not his parents'. It was Victor who wanted to become Wemby. " Basketball, my goal was to be at the highest level. They did everything to help me get there," he confides.

"If I tell them today that I don't want to play basketball anymore, that I want to be an accountant, they will do everything possible to help me become an accountant."

Victor Wembanyama

to franceinfo

Chartered accountant could have been a serious option for Victor, who graduated with honors from his ES baccalaureate a year early. A grounding in economics is rather useful for someone who has become Wemby and who must manage an account where millions of dollars are now arriving.