Victor Wembanyama’s parents were in Paris on August 27, watching France play Slovenia in a FIBA World Cup qualifier. Their son wasn’t playing that night. He wasn’t even in the country. Victor was in Texas, in the middle of his own offseason, while Félix Wembanyama and Élodie de Fautereau-Vassel sat with Bouna Ndiaye and Jérémy Medjana, the two agents who run his career, at a game that had nothing to do with him.
Four days before that, Félix had gone to a France friendly in Orléans. Just under three weeks earlier, he’d been at a chess and basketball event in Le Chesnay, the family’s hometown, that Victor started himself. Victor wasn’t at either one.
Élodie coaches basketball for a living, and has for years, working mostly with kids between four and ten years old. She was born in France on August 12, 1971, stands six foot three, and played professionally before she moved into coaching. She’s also the parent Victor credits with putting a basketball in his hands to begin with. By his own account, though, she never coached him.
Speaking to EuroLeague’s website in January 2022, he said it plainly. “It’s not that she doesn’t want to get involved in my performance, but she knows her role.”
Félix never played basketball. His sport was track and field, mostly the jumps, high jump, long jump, and triple jump depending on the year, and he stands around six foot six. He was born in Belgium, to a family with roots in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and became a French citizen in 2003. What he gave Victor early on was physical rather than tactical: he taught him to run properly as a kid, and taught him to juggle three basketballs at age seven, the same year Victor started organized basketball.
There’s no account anywhere of how the two of them met. What is documented is that they’ve been raising children together since at least 2001, when their first child was born.
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How his agent knew the family first
Victor’s agent, Bouna Ndiaye, didn’t find him through scouting. He already knew the family. Élodie had been coaching Ndiaye’s own son since the boy was five years old, long before Victor was anyone’s idea of a future NBA player. Ndiaye has said that even then, knowing the family well, neither parent ever mentioned they had a son of their own.
He put it directly in an October 2022 interview with SLAM magazine.
“Even though I have known his parents for years, they never talked to me about their son. That’s not who they are.”
Ndiaye didn’t start paying attention to Victor until he was 14, at a tournament in Créteil. By then, Victor had spent years around gyms his mother worked in, without ever being one of her students.
A family already inside the sport
Basketball runs on both sides further back than Élodie. Her father, Michel de Fautereau, played center in France’s top division in the 1960s, a big man known for dunking at six foot seven, and her mother Marie-Christine played as well. It kept going forward, too. Victor’s older sister, Ève, born in 2001, plays professionally now and has represented France at junior level. His younger brother, Oscar, born in 2007, came through the same academy in Nanterre that Victor did and is still playing in France. By the time Victor was born in January 2004, there wasn’t a version of this family that existed outside the sport.
Victor has said none of this involved pressure. He told Good Morning America in 2023 that his parents “really didn’t interfere” with his sport, and that letting him find his own way cost them something. “They made a lot of sacrifices,” he said.
That explanation gets repeated often, and it might be exactly right. But a kid who grows up around a grandfather who played professionally and a mother who coaches the game for a living doesn’t need much pushing toward basketball. It was already the only thing in the room.
What this month looks like
Élodie is still coaching other people’s children in France. Félix spent the past three weeks going to a French national team friendly, a World Cup qualifier, and his own son’s event in Le Chesnay, and Victor wasn’t at any of them. Whether that’s restraint or just how deep the habit runs, none of it looks any different now than it did before their son was famous.
Sources: Bouna Ndiaye’s account of meeting the family comes from a SLAM magazine feature published in October 2022. Victor’s comments on training with his mother were first reported by EuroLeague Basketball in January 2022. Élodie de Fautereau-Vassel’s playing record and birth date are listed in FIBA’s official player database. Background on the family is also drawn from Wikipedia’s entry on Victor Wembanyama.
