🏀0️⃣6️⃣1️⃣ Fabrice Gautier
Meet Fabrice Gautier, the “Flying Osteopath” whose work with athletes on both sides of the Atlantic builds bridges as he translates and fine-tunes French understandings of the United States and vice versa.
A lifelong lover of basketball, Gautier’s sports performance practice and role with the French national basketball team (2009-2024) provided a front row seat to basketball’s renaissance in France and its ripple effects into the NBA, WNBA and beyond.
Fabrice’s Story
Gautier played basketball as a kid in the Val d’Oise in the 1980s. At the time, the NBA wasn’t readily available on television, so he read about the league through Maxi Basket, a magazine published by passionate journalists who reported on the NBAm as well as French and European basketball. “It was the best school to develop your basketball culture overall,” he recalled. Canal + started broadcasting games in 1985, voiced by Franco-American George Eddy, who helped further school Gautier and generations of future NBA, WNBA, and EuroLeague players on basketball.
In 1999, Gautier moved to the United States where he built an osteopathic practice based in Los Angeles. Ever since, he’s had a unique perspective on the development of French basketball – and its recognition within the United States. Some of his clients included Ronny Turiaf, Boris Diaw, Tony Parker, Carmelo Anthony, Nicolas Batum, Rudy Gobert, Candace Parker, Sandrine Gruda, Chelsea Gray, Kevin Love, and LeBron James. He’s also worked with members of France’s football team, such as Aurélien Tchouaméni and Jules Koundé. Along the way Gautier has engaged in different types of sports diplomacy.
The Sports Diplomacy Connection
Gautier has served as a type of informal sports diplomat through his private practice. Because he has lived in the United States for more than two decades, he can help his French patients better understand their surroundings. Most are tuned into the U.S. sports system. “They know it,” Gautier explained, “so I just fine tune their perceptions.”
The Flying Osteopath has also helped U.S. players better understand French perspectives. One example was after France won the FIFA World Cup in 2018 and South African comedian Trevor Noah claimed that it was a win for Africa. “You educate,” Gautier said of how he had to explain why the remarks were so controversial to his American patients, who thought Noah’s claims were valid.
“It’s like, ‘yeah, no.’ [The French team] have roots in Africa or the Caribbean, but they were born in France and some of them are from mixed [backgrounds]. It was trying to make [the Americans] understand that even though we have a team of all black people, that they're French. Some of the kids that represent the French national teams in soccer and basketball, they have roots a little bit everywhere because France, like the United States, they're both immigration-fueled countries.”
The complexities and devastating legacies of France’s colonial past are fair game for debate, Gautier noted. “But if you remember the response of the actual players to Trevor Noah, it was pretty outstanding. They just destroyed him” for questioning their French identity.
Another area that Gautier helps translate for American patients is the rise of French basketball and its youth player development pipeline. It’s getting them to know the players more than anything else,” he explained, “having that privileged position with them, correcting some of the assumptions that they might have about a player.
“We’re starting to feel a little more respect, a little more understanding.”
The inroads made by French players in the NBA over the last three decades have helped break barriers. That is helped by the fact that NBA teams today know that the French players they pick will be well trained and, thanks to the training system, have already played professionally in Europe. “Because of my position with the French team, I was able to explain to them a little bit more about the French players playing in the NBA,” he said.
The Paris 2024 Experience
Gautier has served as a different type of sports diplomat through his role as osteopath with the French national team–particularly his last Games on home soil. “The final game was definitely a notable memory,” he said of how France contested the gold medal match against Team USA.
“It’s really about the journey, so it’s hard to pinpoint a particular moment. But my favorite moment was the struggle: to see the group coming together, winning, and playing that final.”
He detailed how the pre-match team huddle changed along the precarious journey to the last match. The team had always rallied to the cry, “Bleu, blanc, rouge!’ But once Team France moved from Lille, site of the Olympic basketball tourney’s first phase, to Paris for the knockout rounds, things changed. “We struggled, getting our butts kicked against Germany, having the Federation starting to sweat because they invested so much, the 3x3 women’s team didn’t do as well as expected [they were supposed to medal]. We were doing bad, and we had all that pressure on us,” Gautier recalled.
“It went from a huddle of the players together saying bleu, blanc, rouge to a huddle of everyone saying tous ensemble [everyone together]. That’s what I remember most: that switch where we were no longer the players or the coach or the performance staff, but the French basketball team as one. That switch happened in Paris, and that’s when, in two days, everything changed.” Editor’s Note: you can watch this turning point in the Netflix documentary, “Court of Gold”
That togetherness, he noted, is what everyone underestimated from the team. It helped them surmount every obstacle except for the game’s greatest three-point specialist Steph Curry who, with three minutes left in the gold medal match, unleashed a series of three-point shots that ensured gold for Team USA.
Basketball Diplomats
“I think that the group, from Tony Parker to the last one [that medaled at Paris 2024] showed the kids in France that we can beat the Americans, it is possible. We actually did it twice: in Tokyo[2021] and in the World Cup in China [2019 where France knocked the United States out of the tournament]. We were able to build a template that I think is going to be the fulcrum of what’s coming next.”
Gautier also served as a sports diplomat on behalf of the game of basketball, part of the larger effort to build a French national men’s team foundation. It’s an effort he likened to how the Michel Platini generation set the tone in the 1980s for onwards generations of French footballing successes. “That was the beginning of establishing a foundation for kids to see, to watch, to start believing, to start thinking, ‘hey, that’s possible,’” he said.
It demonstrated that Les Bleus were not there merely to participate. “That de Coubertin mentality held us back for so long,” Gautier opined of a mindset that promoted participation, not necessarily victory.
Then in 1998, France won the FIFA World Cup and showed what could be achieved.
Basketball, according to Gautier, has reached a similar point.
From the Val d’Oise France to Los Angeles, California
Further Reading/Resources
[E] Interview with the Author, September 2025; October 2018
[E] Chapter 15 “La Vie en Bleu,” in Lindsay Sarah Krasnoff, Basketball Empire: France and the Making of a Global NBA and WNBA, Bloomsbury, 2023.
[E] Isa Simon, “The Body Mechanic: The story of Fabrice Gautier, physical therapist and osteopath to elite NBA athletes and the French national men’s basketball team,” French Cluster, April 9, 2023.
[E] Courtside Club, “Sports performance osteopath Fabrice Gautier on working with Tony Parker, Carmelo Anthony, and Candace Parker,” ESPN Radio, February 16, 2023.
How to Cite This Entry
Krasnoff, Lindsay Sarah. “Voices: Fabrice Gautier,” FranceAndUS, https://www.franceussports.com/voices/061-fabrice-gautier. (date of consultation).