THIS IS ME: NIKOLA KARABATIC
If you are a handball fan, you probably have heard of my name.
While I am, as you can imagine, really proud of that, I also always took fame with caution.
Sure, from a very young age, I had this ambition to take my sport as high as possible, to make handball as big as it could possibly be. I also wanted to wave the Karabatic flag high in the sky in honour of my dad, for him to be proud of me.
But I also very quickly found out that everyone could make you king one day, and you could be down in the gutter the following morning.
So I really tried to take all that came to me throughout my career with a step back and a wry smile. It was important for my sport to get bigger that I would be in the spotlight, but in the meantime, I really tried not to take that for granted.
Maybe all of that comes from my education. I was born in the former Yugoslavia from Branko, my dad, and Lala, my mum. Her real name is Radmila, but everyone calls her Lala, so you can as well.
My dad was a handball goalkeeper, and he moved from what is now Serbia to France in 1984, when I was just a few months old. For four years, I stayed in Nis with my mum.
When I was younger, my dad was my hero. He was strong, he was loving, he was careful, and he was brave enough to move to France in his thirties while he could have stayed in his home country and had a good life.
And that, to younger me, was something incredible. My dad was driven by a will to make a better life for the ones around that was completely unmatched.