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As Les Bleus face the United States in the quarter-finals of the Games this Tuesday evening at 9:30 p.m., we take a closer look at the man who has been racking up offensive goals and who has been carrying the French team for the past week.
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During the first two games of the French wheelchair basketball team at the Games, he was the only one we saw. Sometimes you wonder if there weren’t two or three of the number 64s of the Blues on the Bercy court at the same time. In his wheelchair, Nicolas Jouanserre was hurtling down the court at full speed. We saw him on the rebound, we blinked, and he was already shooting (and scoring) on the other side of the court. On Saturday evening, August 31, after a few minutes of play, the scoreboard showed 4 points for Germany. And 11 for the 39-year-old Frenchman.
The day before, the French team’s shooter had scored 38 of his team’s 68 points in the opening defeat against Canada. Enough to make him one of the very best scorers in the competition. And one of the most used too (35 minutes on average over the first two games). The fact that there were 13,000 supporters in the stands – about 13,000 more than during the championship matches he plays with his club Hyères-Toulon – didn’t really seem to bother him. “There are people who the public will paralyze. And others who will perform thanks to that. I feed off it. It’s often when there’s no stakes or pressure that I can tend to
