Photo: IMAGO/NurPhoto//Giorgos Arapekos
The basketball star Mathias Lessort is one of the athletes who also takes a stand beyond the playing field. The employee of the Athens club Panathinaikos, who won silver at the Olympics with France’s national team, now expressed solidarity with the protest movement against social injustice in Martinique, where he was born 29 years ago. The sometimes violent protests against social injustices, the increase in the price of life and post-colonialism on the island, which has been under French ownership since 1635, have been going on for weeks. There is a lack of jobs and prospects, and more than a third of the population lives in poverty. At the same time, the prices for food and services have risen and are already significantly higher than in the mother country.
Lessort came there at the age of 15 as a young player for the first division club Élan Chalon. At 21, the massive 2.06 meter center made his breakthrough to the top at JSF Nanterre. In addition to stints in Spain, Serbia and Israel, he was also active in the Bundesliga for Bayern Munich in the 2019/20 season.
The cost of living on the Caribbean island is unbearably high because its residents are the hostages of a few people “who have a monopoly on the food trade and the real estate market,” says Lessort. It’s specifically about the Béké. These are the clans of the descendants of white slave owners and colonial rulers in the French overseas territory with 360,000 inhabitants. At the same time, the professional athlete denounces it as hypocrisy when athletes from the Antilles are used as figureheads in France, while at the same time the places from which they come are neglected by the government.
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