2023-12-11 17:39:13
Trondheim (Norway) (AFP) – The aerial Orlane Kanor has taken flight again. After missing the 2021 Olympics due to injury, the left back with impressive vertical relaxation and “slightly late maturation” asserts himself a little more, at the World Handball Championship, as the long-distance threat of the Blues.
Published on: 12/11/2023 – 6:39 p.m. Modified on: 12/11/2023 – 6:37 p.m.
3 mn
His four goals against Norway (24-23) were essential in the small feat achieved by the French team, which remained on three defeats in competition against the Scandinavians and which will face Trondheim (Norway) on Tuesday in the quarter-finals to the Czech Republic.
“It was great, I had a lot of fun, had quite open shooting situations. I really took my responsibilities and it made me feel good. The girls also made sure that I could have these solutions. I’m fine and things are going well”, she rejoiced in front of the press in the corridors of Spektrum.
The coach Olivier Krumbholz also praised the performance of his player, increasingly important in his offensive system after a Euro-2022 already on an upward slope: the 26-year-old Guadeloupean is “the arm of the French team”, the the only one capable of shooting arrows nine meters or more.
She is also among the best long-distance players in the competition (16 goals out of 25 attempts), posing a constant threat to opposing defenses: when she doesn’t take her chances, she forces them to go up, which can free up space in their back.
“I think I’m perhaps reaching maturity. I’m calmer, less ‘crazy’ above all, fairer in my choices,” she comments.
“A slightly late maturing player”, Kanor (1.78 m), called up for selection as a youngster from 2017, has “still a very good margin for improvement”, according to Krumbholz, who is also using her more and more in defense.
Captain of Rapid Bucharest
This progression was abruptly stopped by a rupture of the left Achilles tendon in April 2021, a few months before the Tokyo Olympic Games.
An almost blank season later, in the summer of 2022 she leaves her cocoon in Metz, where she arrived at the age of 18 from Guadeloupe, for Rapid Bucharest.
A forced departure – “I would have liked to stay in Metz” – which she took advantage of to “put herself in danger, grow, see another style of play”.
However, she took a little time to “mourn (her) training” in Metz under the leadership of Emmanuel Mayonnade: the Romanian club is less structured, the training less thorough.
© Beate Oma Dahle / NTB/AFP/Archives
“I wasn’t running enough, there wasn’t enough movement, the tactics weren’t precise enough,” she told AFP.
But when she “agreed” to live a different experience in Bucharest, “a weight lifted, there was a click”, she remembers: “I felt freer”. More important in the team too, essential cog of Rapid Bucharest, involved in the Champions League, to the point of being named captain this season.
“It made me gain confidence in myself,” says Kanor, joined this summer in the Romanian club by her twin, left winger Laura, not yet an international.
Orlane, she doesn’t “think too much” about the Paris Olympics after the fate of her injury in 2021: “I simply hope to be able to pretend to be in the group, defend my place, move forward calmly without injury.” This is the case for the moment.
© 2023 AFP
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