Victor Wembanyama says his mother put basketball in front of him long before the NBA did. That help came from Élodie de Fautereau, a former French national team player and coach who introduced him to the game in the western suburbs of Paris, not far from Versailles, where he grew up in a family that treated basketball like inheritance.
Wembanyama credits de Fautereau with opening the door, but not pushing him through it. She now coaches young children, and he said he spent much of his early childhood at whatever gym she was working in at the time. “She teaches basketball to really young players, like, from four to 10 or something like that. But for performance, I never trained with her,” he said. “It’s not that she doesn’t want to get involved in my performance, but she knows her role. You know what I mean? And she knows as a parent sometimes it’s better to fade off or not to get too much involved in your children’s path.”
That balance mattered because basketball was everywhere in the Wembanyama home, but it was never forced. Wembanyama said he still had a choice to play or not play, even as he added that he could not avoid the sport in his family. His father, Félix, was a track and field athlete who competed in the high jump, long jump and triple jump, while both parents stand well above six feet. His older sister, Ève, plays basketball professionally, and his younger brother, Oscar, has already won a junior national title with Nanterre 92.
Before settling on basketball, Wembanyama also played soccer as a goalkeeper and practiced judo. He started his career in France at age 15, then moved onto a stage that quickly outgrew any youth gym in suburban Paris. The San Antonio Spurs selected him first overall in the 2023 NBA Draft, and he was unanimously named the 2024 NBA Rookie of the Year. He finished second in Defensive Player of the Year voting that season, then won the 2025-26 Defensive Player of the Year award outright, becoming the youngest and first unanimous recipient in the award’s history.
His rise has also played out under international lights. Wembanyama won an Olympic silver medal with France at the 2024 Summer Games in Paris, and television cameras captured him falling into de Fautereau’s arms after the United States beat France in the gold medal match at the 2024 Olympics. The scene fit the rest of his story: a superstar built in public, but rooted in a family that understood exactly when to step in and when to step back.
Wembanyama has said his mother is “more like me,” adding that they really resemble each other and that she can be eccentric sometimes. In his case, the lesson from the victor wembanyama parents story is not just where his size or skill came from, but how his family helped make basketball feel inevitable without ever making it compulsory.
