Six-foot-10 pre-teen basketball player getting attention after video goes viral

TORONTO A grinning Denver Nuggets guard Jamal Murray posed for a selfie at last weekend’s regional finals for the Jr. NBA world championship in St. Catharines, Ont., with a 12year-old boy.

Murray requested the selfie, not the other way around.

Why? Because standing a sky-high six-foot-10, Olivier Rioux towers over the Canadian NBA player by seven inches.

The pre-teen from Anjou, a borough in east Montreal, became an unsuspecting internet star over the weekend when a video of a game he’d played against fellow 12-year-olds in Spain went viral. Playing on eight-foot nets against players that looked like toddlers by comparison, Rioux thoroughly dominated.

Rioux stood like a maypole in the centre of the pre-game huddle, his teammates dancing around him. He swatted away shots with ease. He dunked without leaving his feet. He scored backwards over his head.

Rioux’s father Jean-Francois is quick to point out the video is an anomaly. Olivier normally plays under-14 basketball for the Tornades de Longueuil, an AAA program in Longueuil, Que., and plays all season on 10-foot rims.

“Everybody thinks he plays with low nets, with very small people all year long, and that’s not the case,” Jean-Francois said.

Rioux was invited by a French team, the Frenchy Phenoms, to play an international under-12 tournament in La Roda, Spain, which is where the viral video was shot.

Jean-Francois is 6-8, while Rioux’s mom Anne Gariepy is 6-1. Rioux’s older brother Emile, who is 15 and six foot nine, also plays basketball.