VIDEO. Insulted by “bonobo” in the middle of a match, basketball player Loïc Akono denounces

“Acts of racial slur are punishable by law, so I hope he will be punished.” Loïc Akono, basketball player in Metz, was the victim of racial insults during a match on January 28th. When he fell in front of one of the stands, a supporter shouted “Get up bonobo”. “So from that point on the nerves were running high, I wanted to talk to this person in the audience. Inevitably, I wanted to say two or three words to him. And then there you go, the referee tried to stop me, and then he made me understand that he was going to give me a technical foul”, explains the player.

“I would have liked the referee to listen to me”

“From there, I said to myself that it was unfair, because I had just been insulted and behind it, it was I who was going to be penalized. I went to see the second referee of the match, obviously, so to tell him that I had just been insulted by a monkey, clearly, and then behind, no reaction.” Loïc Akono then decided to leave the match due to the lack of positioning of the referees. “I would have liked the referee to listen to me and take the time, even if the match is stopped perhaps three to four minutes, take the time to listen, to consult his colleague, the officials in the room, and to know a little… to make a decision, in fact“, does he think.

The player then denounces more broadly the racism of which the sportsmen are victims, and underlines the lack of condemnations vis-a-vis these acts. “We often see acts like that in football, where the players are told to go out, but others tell them ‘no, you shouldn’t go out, you have to be smarter than that’. Actually no, there is no story of being smarter and having an answer on the pitch or not. It must be punished directly. Today, we have super-developed technological means that can allow us to target people, so we have to target people and then we have to get them to leave the stadium.”