“Shaquoubou” hangs up his sneakers.
Already withdrawn from the French team since 2016, Isabelle Yacoubou is ending her career.
The 1.90m interior bows out with a well-filled CV.
Absent due to a knee injury since her last match against Charleville-Mézières on January 24, she will no longer return to action by the end of the season.
A hard blow for the basketball player who ended her career with Tarbes, her favorite club, with whom she played her first professional match in 2005.
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A member of the French Olympic team in 2012, she was part of the adventure until the final against the Americans (86-50 defeat).
The Franco-Beninese had a busy career in the best European clubs between Schio (Italy), Valencia (Spain), Spartak Moscow (Russia) and Fenerbahçe (Turkey).
After a short stint in China, she returned to France in 2019 at Tango de Bourges.
Since 2022, she has returned to the Hautes-Pyrénées to finish her career there.
A 21-year fight that she began in her native Benin where she set a national record in the shot put – which held from 2004 to 2016 – before leaving for the South-West of France.
Also read: Isabelle Yacoubou: “We are conditioned to tell ourselves that we cannot be a mother and a sportswoman”
A fight also against prejudice, in particular, like when she became pregnant in 2018. “I was lost.
I had just signed a three-year contract for almost 1 million euros (with the Italian club Schio, which she ultimately decided to leave to experience her pregnancy in France), it was to be the last contract of my career, says - she in an interview with Le Parisien in 2023. We are conditioned to tell ourselves that we cannot be a mother and a sportswoman.
Either you stop your career or you remain an athlete, but never both at the same time.
That was my reality.”
At club level, abroad and in France, she has won everything except the Coupe de France.
An almost perfect track record to which are added five medals with the French team, including a gold at Euro 2009. Her career change is natural since she is a television consultant and she will join the technical staff of Tarbes at starting next season.