VIDEO. Abuse, sexual assault… How a Toulouse MMA champion chases away the ghosts of the past with his fists

A colossus with slightly stooped shoulders torturing a punching bag. With each of his blows, an almost hypnotic thump vibrates against the walls of the Tactical Fight Team in Toulouse.
Despite this hubbub amplified by hip-hop music, Manon Courrieu remains focused. She follows the instructions of Charles, one of her trainers, to the letter. On the tatami of the MMA (mixed martial arts) club in the Patte d’Oie district, this young woman with dark skin and an angular face is testing new techniques with Anastasia and Kelly, her training partners.

She deploys an entire arsenal of armlocks and chokes with the attention to detail of a jeweler. The bodies intertwine and engage in a complex ballet of the trunk, hands and lower limbs. The forearms overheat, but Manon remains untouched, certainly not out of breath.

“My ex split my head open”

He is a ball of muscle with extraordinary stamina. “Cardio has always been my forte,” she smiles. She has retained the haughty attitude of her years of ballroom dancing and added a reinforced concrete abs thanks to bodybuilding and intense MMA training. “I had always wanted to practice a martial art, but I had never dared to take the plunge. I had to overcome my fear of taking punches and being hurt. From the first class, I had the feeling that I wanted to know how to protect myself better in case of an attack,” she confides.
The young 27-year-old wrestler has previously suffered serious trauma. “As a child, my mother beat me throughout my childhood, I experienced the same with my former partner. He even went as far as opening my skull,” she says. The athlete also indicates that she was raped a few years ago during a night out: “I filed a complaint six years after the events. It was rejected.”

“I’m a Killer”

She learns, little by little, to free herself from her past, through introspection and the joy of sports competition: “It has become my field of expression. During matches, I manage to externalize things that I cannot say in words at first, I was afraid to hurt my opponents, the abuse I had suffered as a child came to the surface. Now, when I face an experienced girl, we fight as equals. We have undergone the same kind of training. For me, it is definitely therapy.

She had three wins and one loss by decision. The Toulouse woman is preparing to challenge Océane Creyx at under 52.5kg in Paris this weekend. On June 1, the number 1 in her category will definitely win the French championship. She commits herself to an ascetic life focused on this goal. She was able to reach the top with only a year and a half of training.