2023-08-28 15:54:11
When it comes to putting a ball in a basket set at 3.05m high, having your shoulders higher than your opponents can have some advantages. Even deprived of the 2.26m of its new prodigy, Victor Wembanyama, who preferred to take a break, the French team can count on the 2.18m of Moustapha Fall and the 2.16m of Rudy Gobert at the Coupe of the basketball world, organized until September 10 in Indonesia, Japan and the Philippines.
Compared to the average height of the French – 163.9 cm for women and 176.6 cm for men (1) – the stature of these champions is far from the norm. This is not without consequence for their body. “Given their long segments, the lever arms in relation to their center of gravity are quite large, indicates Geoffrey Wandji, doctor of the Blues. The fairly classic areas of weakness in basketball remain the knees, ankles and lower back. »
A sometimes heavy gaze on the very tall
Their status as top athletes spares them, at least, the daily hassles of ordinary mortals. They have the means to sleep on mattresses adapted to their measurements. That doesn’t always keep them out of sight. “Of course, on the pitch, being tall is an advantage, says the sports doctor. Outside, it’s less obvious, especially when you have a somewhat introverted temperament. It focuses attention and feeling watched in the street because you are 2.15 m tall, it is sometimes heavy. »
The same goes for teenagers who are three heads taller than their peers. “Being tall is valued in our societies, but there is still a psychosocial impact of being tall, notes Céline Klein, lecturer and surgeon at the University Hospital of Amiens-Picardie. Among the boys, again, it’s fine. This refers to the image of the strong man, to Hercules. In women, it is much more difficult. This can be a source of anxiety, depression, lack of self-confidence, even marginalization, and these disorders can persist into adulthood. »
If the practitioner receives families in consultation, it is to answer questions from parents worried about the development of their child. “The essential issue is to know why this child is tall, she continues. VSWhat makes you grow is the growth cartilage in the bone, which depends on hormones.Is tallness constitutional, because her parents are tall? Or is there a disease behind it? » Because certain pathologies explain the excessiveness of the silhouettes.
Large sizes that can be pathological
One of the most spectacular is acromegaly, gigantism caused by an excess of growth hormone secretion. The Romanian Gheorghe Muresan, 2.31 m below the height, the greatest basketball player to have ever walked the French floors, suffered from it. If this dysfunction of the pituitary gland remains extremely rare, Marfan syndrome is a little more widespread. According to the Haute Autorité de Santé, France had 12,000 patients affected by this genetic disease in 2018. “It is the least rare of the rare diseases, reports Catherine Couturier, member of l’association Marfans. Many people have it without knowing it. »
The consequences of Marfan’s syndrome can indeed be discreet, without always appearing immediately. But they can also be very heavy. The evil manifests itself at the level of the cardiovascular system, the eyes and the skeleton. Hence the large sizes. French basketball hopeful, Jonathan Jeanne, 2.18m, discovered in 2017 that he was a « Marfan » by appearing in the draft, the selection made by the NBA, the North American league. He failed after medical tests. In the most serious cases, the vital risk can be engaged by a dilation of the aorta.
“The body adapts to the size gradually”
In the absence of basic treatment, medicine can only treat the symptoms, in particular by surgery. Estelle, the fourth of Catherine Couturier’s daughters, underwent 16 operations. Heart, back, feet, eyes… At 29, visually impaired, she sings, plays the piano and has trained to be a corporate masseuse. “She has an incredible temper, her mother insists. She’s fine, but it’s an incurable disease. She knows that she will be operated on again one day and a large body, with many malformations, it leads to pain, activities are limited. »
Doctor Wandji does not worry about the health of the giants in his care. ” They are fine, he insists. Injury is not fatal. These are people who have been tall all their lives, the body adapts to the height gradually. Victor Wembanyama, it’s 19 years of adaptation. »At 11, he was already 1.91 m tall.
The limits of the growth of the human species
What if these extraordinary sizes became, one day, the norm, while human beings have generally tended to grow in recent decades? Since Napoleon, the average Frenchman has thus grown by about fifteen centimeters, the result of the diversification of food, the improvement of hygiene and the benefits of vaccination. “There is a factor that we often forget, it is the genetic mixtures, adds Alain Froment, doctor and anthropologist. This is called hybrid vigor. Before, we got married in his village. With parents more distant geographically, we have more robust individuals than with an endogamous system. »
This evolution is also found today in the growth curves of children, established to detect pathological cases. Those updated in 2018 in France draw much larger profiles than those of the 1950s. But comparisons between eras can be misleading. Taller than their parents at the same age in kindergarten, toddlers will not necessarily be taller at university. « The phenomenon combined with a phenomenon of earlier puberty, explains Barbara Heude, research director at Inserm at the Center for Research in Epidemiology and Statistics. However, the earlier the puberty, the earlier a child stops growing. »
“We have reached our ideal size”
The increase in the average height of adults tends to slow down in our latitudes. Supposed to be the tallest people on the planet, the Dutch born in 2001 are on average 1 cm shorter than those of the generation born in 1980. They now measure 182.9 cm, according to results published in 2021 by the Office center of statistics. The Dutch, they measure 169.3 cm against 170.7 cm. “We have reached an asymptote, which corresponds to our genetic potential for growth in our societies, high-income countries”continues the researcher.
Alain Froment, who was responsible for the anthropology collections at the Musée de l’homme, also notes this when tracing the thread of the history of humanity: “We have achieved our ideal. Each species has its own. An oak tree does not grow to the sky. In the human species, it is the same. Of course, there will always be exceptionally large individuals and pathological cases. But our skeleton is built to have a certain height, that of prehistoric hunter-gatherers, who measured around 1.80 m. »
This size had already been reached by Cro-Magnon Man. This 27,000-year-old ancestor was more slender than medieval man. “The current growth is only catching up with the Neolithic”, concludes the anthropologist. But basketball also gives a chance to templates closer to current normality. Sylvain Francisco played in the World Cup with the Blues measuring 1.79m.
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What is it to be big?
According to the World Health Organization, being tall is 176.3 cm for a woman and 191.2 cm for a man. The notion is defined by a height greater than or equal to +2 standard deviations (SD) on reference growth curves.
These curves do not have a universal value, the average size varying according to the regions of the world, according to ethnic groups and levels of development. For 19-year-old boys, in 2019, the average height was 1.83 m in the Netherlands and 1.60 m in East Timor.
In France, an adult height is considered “normal” when it corresponds to that reached by 95% of the population: between 152 cm and 177 cm for a woman; between 162 cm and 190 cm for a man.
The tallest known man in the world is the American Robert Wadlow, died in 1940, who was 2.72 m tall. Among women, the record is held by the German Marianne Wedhe, who died in 1883, who measured 2.53 m.
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