For me, Kempa is a brand that stands out from the others because it wants to change the landscape for team sports brands, and it’s also the only brand that is 100 percent handball, something that didn’t exist until now. It’s a handballers’ brand for handballers. That’s why I’m very proud to be able to represent this brand and its products, because we work together to try to improve Kempa products by trying to develop new things so that Kempa trainers and branded products will be the best of the best, and I think that when you look at the evolution of the last few years, I get the impression that things have been fairly spot on, so it’s a major success.

Michelin means tyres, the Michelin Man, and very high technology for cars. Here in France, when you talk about high performance in tyres, Michelin will be brought up, and so to imagine cooperation between Kempa and Michelin, I think it makes sense, and we’re also quite nice vehicles. Kempa is a German-based brand, and Michelin is 100 percent French, and we’re sort of at the crossroads of those two cultures. We play in Germany, we represent the Kempa brand, and we’re French, so I think it’s nice to be able to play like that, combining two companies that I think have the same taste for perfection and the same desire to make things happen and advance their products… so it’s perfect!

I’m going to tell you a story that’s completely different to my brother’s. I was a bit older than him. Like him, I wandered into the gyms in the area where I was born very early on. I think that our parents were able to pass on their passion for the sport to us, and they introduced us to it, and they and their friends taught us a lot. We sort of fell into it very quickly. If you want to try to describe our sport, you could say that it’s really an all-round sport. You need to run, you need to jump, you need to throw. It’s a team sport. You need others to be able to progress, and I completely identified with this type of activity, which is why I’m still chasing after the ball today.

To go back to what I was just saying, the people at Kempa are young people, people who have understood that to work with the world of sport, you have to surround yourself with the players themselves, you need to leave room for them. So they were able to place their research, their product development at the disposal of handballers, so the atmosphere is really very good. You feel like you’re working together, like you’re on the same path, which I hope will continue to allow us to rake in successes.