Paris (AFP)

Just over three months before the Tokyo Games, the French handball players lost their captain Siraba Dembélé to injury, a huge blow for the contenders for Olympic gold.

It is on an innocuous action, in the very last seconds of a quarter-final second leg of the Champions League that Siraba Dembélé's season ended prematurely on Sunday.

Bucharest, the club where she has been playing since last summer, must score a goal to snatch CSKA Moscow's qualification for Final 4. The last Romanian action is stammered, the ball reaches the French left winger who tries one last shoot.

At the reception, the Frenchwoman writhes in pain and leaves the floor in tears, helped by members of the Romanian management, eliminated from the Champions League and especially while awaiting examinations to determine the severity of the injury.

The verdict fell on Tuesday in the middle of the afternoon and it is final: the left winger, world champion in 2017 and European champion in 2018 with the Blue, suffers from a complete rupture of the right Achilles tendon .

Season ended, required passage on the operating table from Wednesday and package for the Tokyo Olympics, where the French ambition to win gold, the only title missing from their impressive record.

- "Not superhuman" -

"This injury necessarily falls at the least ideal time. It was to be my last competition with the France team and it's difficult to swallow," responded Siraba Dembélé, quoted in the press release from the French Handball Federation.

"It's been years that we are on the rhythms of madness, it is always a very intense period and I am not superhuman. The body loose at one point", she explained, stressing to have been spared by injuries so far in his career.

For the coach of the Bleues, Olivier Krumbholz, and the whole of the France team, it is a huge blow.

At 34, Siraba Dembélé is the leader of the tricolor wardrobe.

She was back in the blue jersey after a maternity break in 2019 and had witnessed the failure of the 2019 World Cup in Japan from afar, ended in the first round by the French.

For her return to international competition, she won with the Blue the silver medal at the European Championship in Denmark in December 2020, beaten only by Norway in the final.

"Siraba is an extremely charismatic person. He is the ambitious leader of this team. She knows that part of the result will depend on her performance and part on that of others."

- Cloakroom leader -

These words, pronounced by Olivier Krumbholz at the end of the last Euro-2020, say a lot about the importance of Siraba Dembélé in the functioning of the France team, which he summed up as follows: "make others do what that we need to win ".

At the left winger position, the coach has several major cards up his sleeve.

The Messina Manon Houette, present during the golden adventures of Les Bleues in 2017 and 2018, returned to her best level after having been operated on on both knees (anterior cruciate ligament and meniscus of the right knee, patella and tendon of the left knee) in early 2020.

She also returned to the France group on Monday for an Olympic preparation course, in which Bisontine Chloé Valentini and Brestoise Coralie Lassource also participate.

But the most complicated will be to find an alternative to the group and locker room leader that was Siraba Dembélé.

"The France team will find a captain, we don't have to rush, it's an important decision. There is a kind of challenge for the team to function without her, but if everyone gives the better of ourselves, we must be able to find our cohesion, with the spirit of what Siraba had put in place, "said the coach.

© 2021 AFP