Towering Montreal preteen taking basketball world by storm
A grinning Denver Nuggets guard Jamal Murray posed for a selfie with a 12-year-old boy at last weekend’s regional finals for the Jr. NBA world championship in St. Catharines.
Murray requested the selfie, not the other way around. Why? Because standing sixfoot-10, Olivier Rioux towers over the Canadian NBA player by seven inches.
The preteen from Montreal’s Anjou borough became an unsuspecting internet star over the weekend when a video of a game he’d played against fellow 12-yearolds 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. The video has more than 700,000 views and caught the eye of a couple of NBA stars.
Joel Embiid enjoyed Rioux talking at his opponents, tweeting: “He has the nerves, the audacity to talk (trash) too lmao”
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, a triple-A program in Longueuil, 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 video was shot. Rioux is just two inches shy of the Toronto Raptors’ tallest players — Jonas Valanciunas, Jakob Poeltl and Lucas Nogueira are all seven feet — and has been playing basketball since he was five, his dad said. Jean-Francois, who was a volleyball player, knew even as a toddler Olivier would be tall. He’s grown at the rate of about 10 centimetres a year and doctors have told the family he hasn’t stopped. Jean-Francois is six-foot-eight, while Rioux’s mom Anne Gariepy is six-foot-one.
Rioux’s older brother Emile, who is 15 and six-foot-nine, also plays basketball.
Shaquille O’Neal, by comparison, was five-foot-10 at Rioux’s age, but would grow nearly a foot by the time he turned 16.
In Ohio, 16-year-old Robert Bobroczky stands seven-foot-seven, which is three inches taller than the NBA’s two tallest players this past season: L.A. Clippers centre Boban Marjanovic and New York’s Kristaps Porzingis. Bobroczky is a Romanian whose parents sent him abroad to attend school and play basketball. The average height of a 12-yearold boy is four-foot-10 and Jean-Francois laughed about what it takes to keep his son fed: “Normal breakfast would be two big cereal bowls, two toasts, yogurt, bananas.”
Rioux, who is a Cleveland Cavaliers fan and whose favourite player is LeBron James, doesn’t mind the attention he’s received over the last few days.
“He finds it very different than before,” his dad said, interrupting his son’s French. “But he’s happy about it.” Jean-Francois, meanwhile, has been fielding numerous requests from people looking to get involved with his son.
“A lot. It’s like I’m refusing a lot of invitations on Facebook and things like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s like easily 50 (people),” he said. “Coaches, agents, brand agents, all the things that people would like Olivier to be involved, scholarships. I have to be careful of who I talk with and how I do. That’s what I’m learning.”
After leading Chenier elementary school to numerous titles, Rioux will attend Saint-Jean-Vianney high school, which his dad said has a strong basketball program, in the fall.