Now in their thirties, Victoria Marcuzzi and Maxime Sandré got to know each other in judo, when they were only about ten years old.
Romanticism may not be dead and beautiful love stories are still popular in bookstores. Some are born in the local cradle, even within sports clubs. Judo for example, a sport with multiple virtues where diversity and good spirit are taught from an early age.
Maxime is as tall as three apples, when the essential Limousin educator Jean-Paul Cattaneo attaches his first white belt to him. The iconic educator also takes a paternalistic look at Victoria Marcuzzi, a playful child who discovers the tatami at the same time as her little comrades. Together they will climb the ladder of the sports hierarchy, yellow, orange, green, blue, brown belt. Together they will encourage each other during the fights, jumping for joys at each ippon. At just fifteen Maxime Sandré will obtain the supreme consecration: the black belt. So when they are teenagers, the ever-present friendship turns into love. Maxime and Victoria look for each other in the crowd of judokas during training. They get closer, share a few short moments of tenderness in the middle of the judokas, a complicity which friends are witnesses.
Childhood love they said! But the years go by and Maxime and Victoria still harbor the same feelings. Professionally exiled in the Toulouse suburbs, a little Amélia was born in 2019. A future judokate, could it be otherwise?
Already in their thirties, they recently decided to formalize their union to the delight of the parents of Victoria, Gislaine and Roger, a former teammate of the red and black treizist house, and those of Maxime, Hélène and Dominique, active members of the Limousin Red Cross.
This modern-day “Paul and Virginia” is a simple story, but a beautiful story which, today, is far from over.
