Seized with indignation, after having been excluded without further ado from her favorite ground, Salimata Sylla, one of the best playmakers of the Aubervilliers basketball club, suffered, for the first time in her career, a terrible humiliation at the beginning of January. A humiliation all the more mortifying as it seemed inconceivable to him, not so long ago.
Ostracized because of a veil, perfectly adapted to the competition, which she has been wearing since her first dribbles under the baskets, the rejection of an unprecedented violence which struck her from the start of a match in Escaudain, in northern France, left her speechless. To the consternation of her teammates, and under the dumbfounded eyes of Sébastien Marie-Sainte, the president of the Aubervilliers club, powerless to influence the irrevocable decision of the referee, Salimata Sylla was forced to stay on the bench, like a plague victim.
Still in shock, the one who is considered the pillar of her team, even as a ” sports ambassador and role model for young people ”, according to the flattering portrait that its president paints of her, today comes out of silence in the Parisianto rebel against the unbearable “injustice” of which she was the victim.
« I win my place for this match, I get up on a Sunday to drive three hours to Escaudain (Hauts-de-France), I change and I warm up with my teammates to then be excluded? While I have an approved headgear? », Takes offense Salimata Sylla.
The days go by, but the balm of time will probably not soon heal the deep bruise in the soul that the basketball player from Aubervilliers feels – she says to herself “very humiliated and hurt” – because the iniquity of his exclusion is most glaring… Indeed, the Paris Olympics agree to what the Republic and its die-hard secularists cannot see: foreign athletes will be able to compete veiled in France during the 2024 Olympics. Go figure!
In addition to the pathological obsession with the veil, this singular French paradox is certainly not likely to restore its luster to the land of the Enlightenment…
Is the witch hunt now open on French basketball courts? There is every reason to fear it, and even to fear that she will give no quarter, if we judge by what the article in the Parisian : « If the regulations of the French Basketball Federation (FFBB) indeed mention the prohibition of headgear for “three or four years” according to the president of the Aubervilliers club, “the witch hunt” would only have really started. in January and “Sali” – as her friends call her – was “not an isolated case ».
