High school basketball player says he was unaware he is actually 29

[Eugene]

Source: The Guardian

High school basketball player says he was unaware he is actually 29

Guardian sport
Wednesday 27 April 2016 17.04 BST

A South Sudanese player who starred for his high school basketball team as a 17-year-old student but was later arrested on suspicion that he was, in fact, 29, has insisted he made an honest mistake – because he didn’t know his real age.

Jonathan Nicola, who at 6ft 9in and 202lbs towered above his peers at Catholic Central secondary school in Windsor, Ontario, was detained for allegedly using false information on a passport and a student visa application. Nicola was arrested on 15 April.

Nicola attended a detention briefing on Tuesday and has been ordered to remain in custody in Canada for now. He did not speak at the hearing, but his testimony from an earlier hearing, when he told officials that his mother had not been truthful about his real age, was made public.

“I aways keep asking what is the specific age that I was born, and she has told me that she could not remember,” Nicola said on 19 April. “Over (in South Sudan), not every year we study. We always keep moving to different schools, and over there, they do not ask your age. They do not ask you nothing.”

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Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/sport/2016/apr/27/canada-high-school-basketball-jonathan-nicola-false-age

[trotsky]

1. I could kind of understand this if he had turned out to be 19, or maybe 20.

But 29? I dunno.