Gaël Rivière, the advocate of blind football

SAs soon as they got off the bus, they headed towards the stadium in single file, their left hand on the shoulder of the player in front. With black blindfolds over their eyes, they now surrounded the coach. “You understand where I’m going with this,” Toussaint Akpweh explained to them. “We’re gradually building our movements. I want a rational occupation of the field, an offensive repositioning. You also have to talk to each other, touch each other, we have to feel the collective. Gaël, Fabrice, you made me doubt this morning, I expect more play in your corridors. Come on, let’s go back!”

The warm-up resumes in the scorching heat, on this synthetic pitch in Lens (Pas-de-Calais) where the French blind football team trains discreetly, in the middle of the mining villages and the 68 slag heap, a pyramid of dust, the last trace of a bygone mining past. Made up of blind and partially sighted players, the team will play its first Paralympic match on 1^is September, against China, at the Eiffel Tower stadium.

The coach’s harshness is surprising: “Get into the game and don’t complicate things. Right now, you’re dangerous for the team, so fix that,” he orders a player. “Toussaint is demanding but highly respected,” whispers the D^r Daniel Méric, team doctor and osteopath, mobilized behind the plexiglass balustrade which, like on hockey fields, materializes the touchline.

“I am a football coach who prepares his team for world competitions,” says Toussaint Akpweh, who won France a silver medal at the London Paralympic Games in 2012.

“They have a disability, I see it more as a difference and it is not at the center of my attention, assumes the coach. They see themselves because they feel themselves, they feel themselves because they listen to themselves, and I work with them on all the sensory channels without ever demanding from them what they could not give me. My goal is to prepare them for the Parisian tension and to lead them to sublimate themselves. From there, there is no room for compassion.”

He adds: “Football for the blind opens up a world of possibilities. If they can do it, then nothing will be forbidden to them.”

They are physiotherapists, sports instructors, computer engineers or piano tuner. Some were born blind; others lost their sight as adults, such as Hakim Arezki, who was shot by the Algerian police during a demonstration for the Kabyle language in which he was participating, or Fabrice Morgado, who was hit by a gunshot while trying to intervene in a fight in a nightclub.

“These boys, who you might come across in the street with a white cane, are capable of running at full speed with the ball at their feet, knowing where they are in space to within a few centimetres. They dribble and hit hard, you can’t measure their performance,” admires the D^r Méric. “In 2006, in Clairefontaine, Raymond Domenech welcomed our group to his training. His players didn’t last ten seconds with a blindfold on!”

Gaël, the player who had made the coach “doubt” in the morning, fared better this afternoon. “I imagine it’s the same at the assizes, we’re more or less good depending on the day,” the coach philosophizes.

Because Gaël Rivière is not only a footballer. He is also a lawyer. Far from the Epinal image of the criminal lawyer, he advises banks, insurance companies, fund managers within the regulatory department of the Bredin Prat firm. The holy of holies – with a few others – of the Parisian business bar.

If you are a client of this firm, founded in 1966 by Jean-Denis Bredin and a certain Robert Badinter, and you have a merger or acquisition to complete or a fundraising to finalize, avoid the date of 1^is September. On that day, the firm will be in the stands to encourage its champion!

“We have reserved a hundred places, we would not want to miss that,” enthuses Patrick Dziewolski, one of the firm’s 52 partners. “Bredin Prat supports Gaël in his Olympic adventure as much as he counts on him as a lawyer. A brilliant lawyer, in a very technical field,” he praises.

“Gaël is an important part of the French team,” says coach Toussaint Akpweh, who is banking on his “ability to break through the opposing block.” “He creates play, he has an amazing ball control outside his feet that really destabilizes the opposing defense,” observes Frédéric Villeroux, team captain. “I love watching him play,” says the team doctor. “In every team, there is an intellectual. Gaël is our intellectual, a fantastic guy and infinitely kind.”

That’s how Gaël Rivière is: everyone loves him. “An extraordinary personality,” says his friend Nolwenn Mandon, who met him at Bredin Prat.

“At first, like many, I was tempted to position myself as a helper, rather than a colleague. I understood quite quickly that he had little need of others, even if he is tactful enough not to show that he hardly needs help to those who give it to him. In fact, he is rather the one who supports others! One might think that a lot of information escapes him, it is quite the opposite. In his relationships with others, Gaël is a precious friend, of rare intelligence, who does not think in an egocentric or selfish way. The way in which he manages to reconcile his sporting and professional careers remains a mystery. For me, he is a wise man!”

When he was 5, he was given a bike. When he saw that he was doing well, his father took the training wheels off: “You’ll fall and hurt yourself, but you’ll get back up.”his mother

“My great luck was having parents who never overprotected me,” says Gaël, with an angelic face and athletic build. “Since I was little, I was able to do what I wanted: play PlayStation, ride a bike, kick a ball around… I didn’t ask myself if it was possible but how I was going to get there. A child’s brain is very plastic. We quickly find ways to adapt.”

23,000 kilometres away, in Sainte-Anne, on the island of La Réunion, where Gaël was born 34 years ago, his mother, Adeline, is his number one supporter. “My son is an incredible guy… but true!” she says with a burst of laughter. “When he was 5, we gave him a bike, like the other children; when he saw that he was doing well, his father took the training wheels off and told him: ‘You’re going to fall and hurt yourself, but you’ll get back up.’”

On a hike, we did the Piton des Neiges and the Cirque de Mafate together. We were aware of his disability, but we never told him: “You’re blind, so you won’t do it.” When, at 14, he wanted to go to mainland France, we let him go. It was non-negotiable…”

This former childminder remembers the birth of her youngest son on December 23, 1989. “He wouldn’t open his eyes, so the doctor came. The diagnosis came very quickly: Gaël was blind. It took me three days to react, then I gave him a bath, I fed him without thinking that he would be able to laugh, walk, live… You realize that I didn’t even think about Gilbert Montagné (she laughs). Then, one day, in the crib, he smiled at me. I said to him: “Hey, are you smiling?” I took him in my arms, my life with Gaël really began that day.”

Adeline and her husband, a mason, consulted a teacher when she was 6 months old. The verdict fell: not enough surface area on the cornea to accommodate a transplant. “My parents understood that there was no prospect of progress,” reports Gaël Rivière. “They decided that I would do with it, or rather without it. It was good because focusing on an improbable cure does not encourage self-construction. I had this little inner voice to motivate me to accomplish things.”

Gaël describes the education he received as “ideal”, “a very fine balance between demands and freedom”. “I was hard on him, as with the others, but we trusted him and we did the right thing”, says his mother. “When he told us he wanted to be a footballer, I said okay, but you’ll also be a lawyer.” Why lawyer? “I don’t know, it was in my head… Even in complicated situations, Gaël always has a solution. And it suited him well.”

We suffer but it is for all these crazy moments which, I hope, will happen to us in Paris.

As a boarder at the National Institute for Young Blind People in Paris, Gaël discovered the city, independence and football for the blind. The coach of the French team came to see him when he was 16 and said: “You’re not there at all, but if you work, maybe we’ll do something with you.”

Toussaint Akpweh – already – sends him to train at the technical center in Bordeaux during weekends and holidays. At the blind football world championships in 2006 in Argentina, he plays a few minutes in a group match. He is 17 years old. The French team, in which he has earned his place, does not manage to qualify for the Beijing Games (2008) but wins the European Championships in 2009 and 2011.

A year later, at the London Paralympic Games, the team stumbled in the final against Brazil. “They’re kings here too,” sighs Gaël. “A huge disappointment at the time, until I realized that a medal at the Games, even a silver one, is still huge.”

Alongside this, Gaël Rivière is also pursuing his studies. Having started a mathematics course, he switched to law. “When I went with him to Assas and saw him in his suit, I said to him, ‘Gaël, you’re a businessman now,’” laughs his mother.

Having graduated top of his two masters (business law and banking law), he obtained his law degree without a hitch. “Bredin Prat had the courage to offer me a collaboration,” he says. “As it is one of the most interesting firms in Paris, I didn’t hesitate.”

Since then, he has been juggling his two careers. The firm has adjusted its schedule, “which means that my colleagues absorb part of my work, for which I thank them,” he says, always considerate.

Where will he be in 5 or 10 years? “Maybe I will have opened my own firm or become a partner. I would like to plead more, everything is open,” he calmly considers, while his mother imagines him as a “top lawyer.”

Before that, he has the Games to lead. The London Games had “thrown him into something great”, so when he found out, just a month ago, that he had been selected, he gave it his all, as always.

At the end of the training session where we met him, in Lens, he said he was “happy” to have been better than in the morning. “We work hard, we suffer, but it’s for all these crazy moments that, I hope, will happen to us in Paris.”