Victor Wembanyama turned heads by kicking a ball out of the net this week. There’s quite the story behind his quest. Scott Wachter / Imagn Images
Editor’s Note: Read more NBA coverage from The Athletic here. The views on this page do not necessarily reflect the views of the NBA or its teams.
***
SAN ANTONIO — Keldon Johnson couldn’t believe what he had just seen. In fact, he wanted to see it again.
Victor Wembanyama, while standing on the ground, had just swiped at a bunch of basketballs sitting inside the net of the hoop where they were warming up before Tuesday’s game against the Memphis Grizzlies. This is the norm for Wembanyama, who reaches where most people leap.
But this was different. The 7-foot-4 Wembanyama did it with his feet.
“I know I absolutely cannot do that,” Johnson said. “For a fact, I know I can’t kick the basketball. My leg doesn’t go that high. That’s impressive. That’s crazy. He tried it the time before that and I was like, ‘Try again.’”
Wembanyama obliged and created the moment that looks too spectacular to be real. But it is. No AI on this one. Victor Wembanyama can kick a basketball out of the net, while still touching the ground with his other foot.
Wait. Wemby did what? pic.twitter.com/HFlftVZI6O
— Don Harris (@DonHarris4) January 7, 2026
In all likelihood, he is the first human being to do this. At least, the first we’ve seen on film.
Players with the requisite length rarely come close to the desired flexibility to make this even remotely possible. But Wembanyama doesn’t just break new ground, he stretches it. All to the point that his high kick was within a whiffing distance of the unofficial world record of nine feet, nine inches.
When Wembanyama was asked about the world record, he brushed it off as something he expects to achieve at some point.
“I can beat that,” Wembanyama said. “I’m confident.”
What he didn’t realize in the moment was that the man he would have to outleap — presuming his toes would have to leave the ground — is the man who helped him get there in the first place.
It’s Kadour Ziani, known in France as the Dunk Father. Ziani, creator of the 7 Postures mobility program, achieved the unofficial highest recorded kick in the world on a 2007 episode of “The Best Damn Sports Show Period.”
It’s not just a coincidence that it belongs to a dunker. The kicks in the sky are merely a destination on a journey they share.
Ziani, the record holder, gained fame in France touring with Slam Nation in the late ’90s as one of the nation’s best acrobatic dunkers. Slam Nation was co-founded by Bouna Ndiaye and Jeremy Medjana, who would go on to create a basketball agency named Comsport. Eventually, they would represent French NBAers Ian Mahinmi, Nicolas Batum, Evan Fournier and Rudy Gobert. It all led them to Wembanyama, whose agent, Ndiaye, is now a courtside fixture at Spurs games.
Ben Patrick, whose Knees Over Toes program has gained popularity in the training world, also studied with Ziani. It turned out that Wembanyama’s longtime trainer, Guillaume Auberge, had been using that program with Wembanyama to develop leg strength and flexibility. Learning Ziani’s 7 Postures was a natural next step.
Auberge was with Wembanyama at French club Metropolitans 92, then stuck with the Spurs star through the draft and is now on the Spurs staff. He had been around the greater Wembanyama apparatus long enough that Ziani was not hard to find. Their paths were more parallel than they could have imagined. So Auberge reached out and offered Ziani a pupil the likes of which he had never seen.
“(Auberge) said, ‘Hey, you need to come to Dallas. I want Victor to see you live and do your stuff and blah, blah, blah,’” Ziani recalled in a phone interview. “So I come to Dallas and I spend maybe two hours. We were on the floor and I teach him all I know. Most guys are scared about the floor. Not him. We were like two kids in the kingdom of childhood.”
Ziani put his new student through various posterior challenges that would push most professional athletes to their limits. It was light work for Wembanyama. That’s when something blissfully tragic dawned on Ziani. By the time Ziani arrived in Dallas, it was too late for him to teach Wembanyama his seven postures. So Ziani told him that he was the Driven Fascia Master.
“You are the animal. You don’t need me,” Ziani told Wembanyama. “I’m useless, you know everything.”
Ziani could not introduce a novel physical set, so he wanted to focus on its connection to his mindset. Throughout the session, he observed Wembanyama’s capacity to perceive, absorb and replicate. Ziani’s sessions require sitting in a squatting position throughout the process. No chairs allowed. The plantar fascia must be educated on every movement because it is the contact point with the ground and needs to be maximized to protect the rest of the body.
As time went on, Ziani could perceive that all nine of Wembanyama’s senses — yes, nine — were operating at full capacity. The world knows the common senses of sight, smell, touch, hearing and taste. Ziani focuses on the other four senses: Vestibular balance, Proprioception (positional awareness), Thermoception (temperature changes) and Nociception (pain).
These are the senses that allow Wembanyama to roll his ankles on crossovers without a hitch. It’s what enables him to crash to the floor over and over and pop right back up. It’s why Wembanyama often grabs at his ankle as if something has gone wrong, then runs back into the play like nothing ever happened.
“He is bamboo-made,” Ziani said. “So people are seeing his ankle moving, but no worries, he is super strong and that for sure is not hurting him.”
He encouraged Wembanyama to stay connected to the floor and let the plantar fascia in his foot educate the rest of his body. The mind-body-floor connection is the key to furthering Wembanyama’s prowess and longevity. He rules the air, but athletes only fly for brief moments. He has to ensure that his connection to the ground has more trust than his connection to the air, all while keeping it sustainable.
These are the lessons that keep Wembanyama pushing to get back in the lineup when his knee was hyperextended earlier in the week and the Spurs want to put him in restraints for his own good. Wembanyama’s goal is to train his mind and body in a way that exceeds best practices.
“He is going to step where I was not stepping,” Ziani said. “I was on the moon. He is going to Mars.”
That first step, apparently, was to do a near-record kick while warming up for his return from a knee hyperextension injury. It’s easy to ask what the hell Wembanyama was thinking, but he is forcing us to reexamine how we understand injury and risk.
“Imagine, you come back from injury to make sure people understand you’re OK, he’s kicking the ball,” Ziani said. “This man is crazy. He’s like me. He’s free. Don’t tell him what he has to do.”
So will Wembanyama break that record? When asked to do it next game, he said not during warm ups. But if you ask him, it will come soon.
And there is reason to believe him. In a June 2023 appearance on the Old Man and the Three podcast, Wembanyama told now-Lakers coach JJ Redick that he was able to kick a ball wedged into the rim when he was 14 years old.
He was reportedly somewhere between 6-foot-10 and 7-foot-2 at that point. He is listed at 7-foot-4 today, though he is widely speculated to be even taller than that.
If he was able to get to a ball hanging in the net while barely leaving the ground, without even practicing the feat, surely there’s plenty of room for him to climb. This is one of the elements of greatness the public rarely sees. The dogged pursuit of precision every morning and evening, it’s ingrained in him.
“Reality is a nightmare for those people like him and like me,” Ziani said. “Reality is a nightmare. But, this nightmare is beautiful because, at the end of the day, lucidity.”
Their shared lineage in the sport has Ziani rooting feverishly for Wembanyama to beat his record. It’s not just a sense of kinship or a validation of the power of his seven postures. Ziani wants Wembanyama to beat him because he sees the Spurs star as a worthy vessel for humanity’s evolution.
“I want him to kick it at 12 (feet). Honor the past, hold the present and build the future,” Ziani said. “Victor is building the future. He is going to step where nobody was stepping before him. Go get up and kick this ball and kick the world record because I want the honor to be beat by him.”
Wembanyama fascinates because he pushes the human physique beyond known limits. This high kick is the latest example, casually tickling a world record set by someone who has dedicated his life to kicking the sun out of the sky.
He is a response to the fear of the AI singularity and a great reminder that humans are evolving in ways beyond technology. As newer technology often aims to box us deeper into an algorithm, the potential next face of the NBA is defined by the breadth and depth of his curiosity. He isn’t just driven by expanding his mind. He is implementing it into his physical existence. In the process, he is willing to struggle to learn how to achieve even more.
He should be the least relatable athlete ever. It has been ages since we’ve seen someone that is such a physical outlier. Yet he’ll also make a huge block, then stampede down the floor for a turnover. Or try to kick an inch higher, just to see his teammates’ eyes light up.
So when he eventually kicks one of Johnson’s cowboy hats off the rim, or whatever he ends up doing to break the record, it won’t be just about putting a foot where it’s never been put before.
It will be about the next Wembanyama, kicking the next hat a few inches higher one day.
“We are not doing this in vain. We are trying to be this example for the future,” Ziani said. “Hey, everything is possible. We don’t have limits.”
***
Jared Weiss is a staff writer covering the San Antonio Spurs and Victor Wembanyama for The Athletic. He has covered the Celtics since 2011, co-founding CLNS Media Network while in college before covering the team for SB Nation’s CelticsBlog and USA Today. Before coming to The Athletic, Weiss spent a decade working for the government, primarily as a compliance bank regulator. Follow Jared on Twitter @JaredWeissNBA
