Basketball players are tall. You know this. Just how tall is easy to forget in practice. Picture how Peter Crouch towered above opponents in the Premier League. Now consider that his 6ft 7in would be unremarkable in the NBA, especially next to the brightest new star in the sport, who is also the face of this Olympic Games.
Frenchman Victor Wembanyama won rookie of the year unanimously after being picked first in the 2023 draft by the San Antonio Spurs. He is 7ft 4in, and you can see him with his team-mate Julian Champagnie.
Champagnie is the same height as Crouch. Such extreme tallness is rare but not unheard of in the NBA. What is unique about Wembanyama is the way he plays. He has a silkiness and ease with the ball which you usually associate with a much smaller player. In other words, good hands for a big man.
“Everybody has been a unicorn over the last few years, but he’s more like an alien,” said LeBron James after Wembanyama’s brilliance dawned on America during a 2022 exhibition game in Las Vegas. “No one has ever seen anyone as tall as he is but as fluid and as graceful as he is out on the floor.” The alien nickname has stuck but Wembanyama does not mind it, as a science fiction fan.
James was the comparison when Wembanyama entered the league, with widespread agreement he was the most exciting prospect since James was drafted 21 years ago. Many others have held that title, which tends to curse basketball players much like any footballer called “the next Pele”. But Wembanyama exceeded expectations, breaking records routinely in his debut season. What makes him so special?
“The versatility that he offers, being able to play like a guard at his height,” says Mo Mooncey, NBA analyst for the BBC. “He can dribble the ball with ease, he can shoot from the perimeter. Even as a rookie, he’s so impactful that other players are scared to attack the basket when he’s near it in case they get their shot blocked. The impact on both sides of the ball makes him pretty much unstoppable.”
There were fears about his health and conditioning, often the undoing of bigger players’ careers, but so far in America he has avoided serious injury. He will exercise and practise barefoot whenever possible, and has a bespoke stretching regime of surprising flexibility, including the splits, to avoid knee and hamstring problems. His father, a former field athlete, taught him proper form for running and even climbing stairs when he was a child. His mother played and coached basketball herself.
“Victor is wise beyond his years,” says Mooncey. “If you’re around that team you know that you can’t reach Victor after 10pm, he’ll be in his room reading a book, then he’ll go to sleep. He takes care of his body and health with a level of maturity that you don’t see throughout many careers.”
Now he carries the weight of expectation of the host nation into a men’s basketball competition which is traditionally a fight for second behind the USA. A medal of any sort would be impressive. France have lost four warm-up games in a row and lack elite team-mates for their star, beyond Minnesota Timberwolves centre Rudy Gobert, but Wembanyama will at least be catered for off court. The French team’s hotel has provided extended beds, large enough to accommodate him and Gobert, a Lilliputian 7ft 0in.
The journalist Benjamin Moubèche covered Wembanyama in France then moved to San Antonio to report on his first season. “Everybody in France is very proud of him, especially in Paris,” he says. “Everybody is so excited to see him play.” Aged 20, is he already the most famous athlete in the country? “There is a gap between Kylian Mbappe and him at the moment. Football is so popular in France, it’s very difficult for a basketball player to get close. But Victor is bridging that gap. For a basketball player he’s huge.
“When you saw him in France, elaborate dribbles, shots a few metres from the three-point line, he was really playing around. I wasn’t sure that he could do that in the NBA. But he has been better than in France and I think he has the potential to be a top-three player in the history of basketball. I don’t say that because I’m French, I really think he’s capable of such an accomplishment.”
Like Mbappe, Wembanyama weighed in on the election, but kept his advice diplomatically non-partisan: “Of course, political choices are personal, but for me it is important to take a distance from extremes,” he said. It is a stretch to say that Wemby-mania will be enough to heal a divided country, but he will certainly provide a wonderful distraction.
2024-07-26T11:03:42Z dg43tfdfdgfd