At 24, Théo Curin is different: when all his friends are on TikTok or Netflix, he prefers to watch television, especially games like the one they loved as children: “Le Bigdil”. “ Koh-Lanta”, “Fort Boyard” or “Star Academy”. These were the shows that kept him entertained when, suffering from a devastating case of bacterial meningitis at the age of 6, he spent months in hospital, from which he emerged with all four limbs amputated.
“Television has given me so much that I want to give back”He said when we met him a few days ago at Les Princes, a brasserie near the Porte de Saint-Cloud in Paris and his home in Boulogne-Billancourt (Hauts-de-Seine). He, in turn, wants to entertain. It was here that his producer, Mehdi Harbaoui, suggested that he audition for “Slam”, to succeed Cyril Féraud (who went on to “Everyone wants to take his place” on France 2) and lead the game to the success of France 3. He returned to Les Princes after learning that he had been chosen: his premiere of “Slam” will be broadcast on September 9.
On 28 August, 10.2 million viewers discovered him at the start of the Paralympic Games opening ceremony. Like Zinédine Zidane, during the parade on 26 July, Théo Curin drove around Paris before arriving at the Place de la Concorde, at the wheel of a red taxi covered in Phryges, the red mascots of the Paris Games. A sequence in the form of a nod to the column he presented for more than a year, Théo le taxi, in “At the Games, Citizens!”, alongside Carole Gaessler. Many then discovered his smiling eyes, his beautiful face (he has been the face of the Biotherm brand since 2019) and his disability.
On the terrace, he is drinking a fruit cocktail because it is… only 11 o’clock. He is very happy to talk about his projects and not about his “story” anymore. “I have told so many things: my illness, the thing, the thing, in the end it gets tiring.” You can read it in The opportunity of a lifetime (Flammarion, 2022), written by Dominique Bonnot, specifies.
“Reversing the roles”
In short, Théo Curin was born on April 20, 2000 in Lunéville, in Meurthe-et-Moselle, to a father who was a computer scientist at the SNCF, separated from his mother, a secretary at the CRS 39. He has an older sister, Ocean. In 2012, he met Philippe Croizon, another quadruple amputee famous for swimming across the English Channel. The latter will convince the boy to take the plunge. At 13, Théo joined the French sports swimming center for the disabled in Vichy and then the French team in 2015. Very quickly, the list grew. At 16 he has 4my in the 200m freestyle at the Rio Paralympic Games. In 2017, she was a double silver medallist at the World Championships in Mexico and then won bronze in 2019 at the World Championships in London.
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