Luc Abalo with the Zeekstar Tokyo jersey. PANORAMIC
The former right winger of the France team will retire at the end of the current season with Zeekstar Tokyo, the Japanese club announced on Tuesday.
End clap for Luc Abalo. The former French international will be honored by Zeekstar Tokyo after the last regular season home game on February 25, the Japanese club said on its website, which, “still with Abalo, aims for the play-offs and the title of champion, Le Zeekstar Tokyo «intends to continue his collaboration with Abalo after his retirement in order to benefit from his support and his experience advice“, added the Japanese club.
Luc Abalo, one of the key men of the great generation of Experts, was the handball artist, a specialist in spectacular gestures on the field and a passion for painting outside. In fifteen years and 289 selections with the French team, of which he was one of the spearheads in attack, the right winger has amassed an impressive record: three times Olympic champion in Beijing in 2008, in London in 2012 and in Tokyo in 2021, three times world champion and three times in Europe. “It is a chance in a lifetime to have been able, thanks to my passion, to provide emotions to people“said the former PSG player on the website of his last club, the Japanese Zeekstar Tokyo.
In blue, Abalo scored 859 goals, without however taking the penalties, in often acrobatic positions that allowed him his elastic body, his formidable relaxation and the speed of his left arm. Contrary to the excessive rationalization that threatens handball like all disciplines, Abalo has always defended the need “on the one hand magic and beautyin his sport by inventing gestures according to his inspiration. “He does things other people couldn’t even imagine. Imagining them would already be awesome. He also realizes them“, said coach Claude Onesta, who gave free rein to his creativity, unlike some of his club coaches.
A childhood in Ivry
Luc Abalo was born in 1984 into a family of Togolese and Ghanaian origin in Ivry-sur-Seine. Discreet about his childhood by refusal “to be a cliché“, he still told the Parisian one day having lived for years at five in 26 square meters. In this city in the Parisian suburbs with a long handball tradition, his exceptional qualities, compensating for a fairly modest size (1.82 m), could not go unnoticed. Trained at the club for twelve years, he won an eighth French championship title in 2007, ten years after the previous one (and the latest). Almost a farewell gift since a year later he took over the management of Ciudad Real, one of the great clubs of the time (now defunct) with which he would win the Champions League in 2009.
Very attached to his family, Abalo returned after four seasons in France, not in Ivry but just next door, at Paris Saint-Germain, which was to become one of the great European teams thanks to the money from Qatar. He added seven French championship titles (between 2013 and 2020) alongside his teammates in blue Nikola Karabatic, Thierry Omeyer and Daniel Narcisse, but not Michaël Guigou, his friend and accomplice on the other wing as a team. from France with whom he has never played in a club. His attempts to win the European title again failed three times in the final.
Painting, photo, video and fashion
An artist with the ball in hand, Abalo is also outside of sport. He always affirmed that once retired he would dedicate himself to painting, a great passion that allowed him “to think of something other than the handduring his career. As a teenager, he took drawing lessons at the Ateliers municipales d’Ivry then, in parallel with his sporting career, he followed a preparatory course at the Higher Institute of Applied Arts with the idea of entering the Beaux-Arts, but he favored the hand by signing in Spain. Attracted by figurative painting, in particular by the portrait, he has already had the opportunity to exhibit his works in Paris. He also dabbled in other forms of art, photography, video and fashion. He even launched a clothing line in 2019, LAN for Luc Abalo Nineteen (his jersey number) by personally participating in the creation of the models.