It isn’t easy to be a giant. You go to a movie and the people behind you moan and change seats. You slow dance with a girl and all you see is the part in her hair. And forget roller coasters. Your average giant would get his head lopped off.
Olivier Rioux is a giant. He’s a 20-year-old Canadian, who, at 7-foot-9, is the tallest player in college basketball history. You should watch him play for UC-Irvine sometime. It’s quite a sight.
When he stands flat-footed, his head nearly touches the net. He can touch the rim without jumping. When he gets the ball underneath, it’s like a carnival ride: Three people are usually hanging off him, one on a hip, one on an elbow and one on a neck. Rioux sloughs them off, jumps just high enough to stick a ham sandwich under his sneakers, and dunks it. I’ve seen him dunk when he was standing under the backboard.
Do you realize how tall 7-9 even is? Most doorways you walk through are 6-8. To get through them, Rioux has to duck down like there’s enemy fire. Most ceilings are 8 feet, which gives him three inches of clearance, unless they have sprinklers. He has a scar in his scalp from one in Mexico City he can tell you about.
Seven-foot-9 is five inches taller than San Antonio Spurs superstar Victor Wembanyama, eight inches taller than Shaq, and Yao Ming looks up to him. On the road, he sleeps on two beds laid end to end.
When he walks the UC-Irvine sidewalks, people gape and seem a little afraid of him. “I think people place a persona on really tall people,” he tells me. “Like, ‘Oh, he’s a giant. He must be mean.’”
He’s not. He’s sweet. On a recent trip to Taiwan, his agent says, Rioux posed for 2,000 selfies a day. He’s so bad at saying no to people that sometimes his teammates have to do it.
“They help me,” Rioux says. “They kind of make a wall around me and tell people, ‘Sorry, Ollie’s not taking pictures today. He’ll get you later.’ I love that.”
But can you blame people? It’s a wild picture. I’m 6-1, and he made me look like a third-grader. (Speaking of which, when Rioux was in third grade, he was taller than his teacher.)
The kid from Terrebonne, Quebec, is a thinker and a dreamer. He loves to draw and paint, swim, play the piano, and dance to EDM. “I just want to be nice to people who are nice to me,” he says. “I want to care about those that need to be cared for.”
Yeah, that’s not going to work in the NBA.
In the NBA, you have to be three-quarters monster. One time, my 3-year-old daughter asked Charles Barkley if he was mean. He looked down at her and said, “Not till 7:30.”
When 7:30 comes, you have to treat every basketball like somebody stole it from you. You have to shove people away, back them down, shut them up. You have to fight for the spot you want underneath like a meteor is coming and that’s the only safe place left on Earth. Rioux doesn’t do any of that. It’s like he’s so used to being twice as big as everyone, he doesn’t want to hurt anybody.
Still, he’s new at this. This is his first college season where he’s actually playing. He spent two seasons on the bench at Florida. (When the Gators won their national championship in 2025, Rioux cut his piece of net down without using the ladder.) And he’s been surprisingly good. In his first official game for UC-Irvine, playing 18 minutes, he got 13 points, 12 boards, 3 dunks and 5,000 gasps.
He has a long way to go, even he admits. It takes him the better part of an hour to get his 305 pounds and size 20 shoes from one end of the court to the other. His center of gravity is so high people topple him like a Jenga tower. In practice the other day, he got knocked over four times. His head coach, Russ Turner, wasn’t having any of that. “You never let them knock you down, Ollie,” he scolded afterward. “Not you. Not ever.” The next game, against San José State, Rioux never hit the floor once. That’s good, since it takes a crane to get him back up.
But if Rioux had even a tablespoon of anger in him, he could average 30 points, 10 rebounds and 5 blocks a game. There are times it seems like he thinks it would be bad manners to block somebody’s shot. He has the wingspan of a Cessna, so if he really came hard at people when they were shooting — like Wemby does — they’d have to bank it off the rafters. Alas, he doesn’t. But it’s early.
Rioux really wants to make it to the NBA — where he would be two inches taller than the 7-7 record holders, Gheorghe Muresan and Manute Bol. He wants it not for the money or the fame but for something else.
“I’ve thought a lot about why I’m here,” he says. “And now I know it’s to represent my country in the best possible way I can.”
So Ollie, if you do sign an NBA deal, what would you buy?
He thinks about it and says, “A house with no chandeliers.”
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