Cyrille Chahboune, ex-soldier and sitting volleyball player

Portrait Having had a leg amputated during a mission in Iraq, this former paratrooper joined the Paralympic sitting volleyball team. A discipline created in the 1940s, precisely to help the war wounded recover.

On the volleyball court, they call him “Cooper.” Whether out of habit or nostalgia, Paralympic athlete Cyrille Chahboune has kept his army code name. Eleven years in uniform, from the age of 19 to 30 – until a booby-trapped drone attack deprived him of both legs one autumn day in 2016 in Mosul. He could have continued in the army, far from the field, but this former special forces paratrooper couldn’t imagine himself behind a desk. So he threw himself into sport. Voraciously. Sitting volleyball, paragliding, skiing, shooting, wind tunnel – a simulation of freefall. To the point of joining the French shooting and volleyball teams, the disabled version.

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A sports bulimia that does not hide, he swears, the quest for adrenaline that inhabited him when he played on war fields. If he loves volleyball, its side effects – the competitions, the crowds and the cameras – leave him indifferent. “We’re bored when we’re in France”, he smiled. “We,” the veterans of the elite units, the ex-military too broken to continue.

When we meet Cyrille Chahboune, between two training sessions at the Creps in Vichy – the sports complex where the sitting volleyball team spends ten days of intensive preparation – he looks back on the birth of the discipline: “Sitting volleyball was created in the 1940s to help rehabilitate war wounded.” He himself discovered the sport after his repatriation from Iraq, following the loss of his legs. During his convalescence at the Percy hospital, Hauts-de-Seine, the physiotherapists would bring out a volleyball net on Friday afternoons and the carers and the injured would play together. Unlike traditional volleyball, the court is smaller; the net is lower; and you can counter the serve. Above all, the game is played sitting on the ground – you move by sliding. Apart from that, it’s volleyball.

Rebuilding after your accident

Since his Friday afternoon games, Cyrille Chahboune, 38, has moved up a gear: CrossFit or muscle strengthening in the morning, volleyball training in the evening and three lunchtimes a week. And up to six or seven hours of daily practice during training courses in Vichy, in the run-up to competitions. He was even briefly supervised by a mental trainer, but preferred to continue to rely on methods inherited from the army: ” Athletes have “routines”, but the problem is that as soon as you move away from it a little, you are lost. I am more into “mental visualization”: I visualize each of the steps of my preparation. And if there is one that has to be skipped, so much the worse, I move on to the next one!

The creation of the French sitting volleyball team in 2016 coincided with his hospital discharge. At the time, he he thought a lot ” on how to rebuild yourself after your accident, and find a reason to live, far from the “passionate job” which took him from Afghanistan to Iraq. A phone call from a friend in the army tells him that a team is being formed: he introduces himself to the coach and brings Guillaume Ducrocq into the adventure – a former colleague of the Air 10 Parachute Commando in Orléans, also an amputee following a booby-trapped drone attack.

Both train at the Haillan club in Bordeaux, one of the fifty sitting volleyball sections in France. Together, they see the weaknesses of a team that has only just been born and must deal with a majority of athletes who have never played volleyball before their accident. But they also witness its rise to power, especially since the team’s budget was increased in the run-up to the Games. Training courses at the Creps in Vichy multiply, as do international competitions. Finally, only Cyrille Chahboune will be selected to participate in the Paris Paralympics. Guillaume Ducrocq could be part of future selections.

France to face world top 7 sitting volleyball nations

Ranked 23^e On a global scale – but automatically qualified since France is the host country of the Games – the French sitting volleyball team knows that its chances of a medal are slim. It will thus face the world’s top 7 sitting volleyball nations, including the leader in the discipline: Iran. Their trump card: Morteza Mehrzad, an athlete suffering from gigantism. The second tallest man in the world, he is 2.47 meters tall. Sitting, he can hit the ball 1.95 meters from the ground. Difficult to counter.

But the young team is counting on the long term: “More than the medal, we would like to introduce this discipline, to make others want to join us – and to have an increasingly successful selection”explains Dominique Duvivier, the team’s coach with a mischievous smile. Supported by three assistant coaches, he leads fast-paced sessions, interspersed with a break where everyone discusses position and game strategy: “If we are overloaded, we also overload, but to unload” – the vocabulary is technical.

Medal or not, a nice reward awaits Cyrille Chahboune at the end of the Paralympic events: he will fly to the United States, to join his wife, a soldier deployed to an American NATO base, and his 5-year-old son. Because of the start of the school year, they will not be in the stands on August 29, during the first sitting volleyball match. A separation to which the couple was already accustomed during the deployments of Cyrille Chahboune and his unit.