Travelling with Dan Elkayam was a joy but it came with inevitable delays.
It was something his girlfriend, brothers and best friend had all experienced — whether in the tiny villages of Malang, Indonesia, or in rural Thailand.
If the 27-year-old saw a football, or any sort of game being played, he had to stop and he had to join in.
“There didn’t even have to be a ball,” says Krystal Troyano, Dan’s partner with whom he lived in the Sydney suburbs. The pair travelled together around south east Asia and Australia.
“I remember we were in the Blue Village in Malang and some young guys were kicking around a plastic bottle. Dan stopped to join in for an hour.
“He’d always be joining in these little games with kids when we were in Indonesia and the children loved him. I’d buy them water and ice creams and they’d just be playing for ages.”
The kind-hearted IT engineer was football-mad, and after that trip he and Krystal talked of starting a charity next year to provide education through football in some of the deprived areas they visited.
“Dan would coach them and I’d teach English,” she says. “That was the idea. We were discussing how we would raise funds for the project and how it would work. We had so many plans.”
Dan and Krystal’s plans for their life together were ended nine days ago by a bullet on Bondi Beach. The Frenchman became one of 15 people killed by gunmen who targeted Sydney’s Jewish community as they gathered to celebrate Hanukkah at its iconic seafront.
Since then, his loved ones have shed tears and shared happy memories as they gathered to celebrate the life of the keen amateur footballer.
A memorial service for the man from the Paris suburb of Le Bourget took place in Sydney on Monday. Krystal then flew to Israel, joined by Dan’s parents, cousins and brothers who also travelled from just outside Paris for shiva, the Jewish mourning period, before his burial in the coastal city of Ashdod.
“Dan was friendly to everyone,” says Krystal, talking to The Athletic via video call from Ashdod. “It didn’t matter to him their religion, colour of skin or what they earned. Since he died, our friends came together, Catholics, Muslims, people without religion. He never differentiated and he had the ability to unite people.”
As they struggle to process their loss, his brother Yohan says: “He’s never looked for drama. He’d try to avoid any fight.
“Even though he was so welcoming to everyone, he died because he was Jewish.
“I hope that by talking about it, and by people realising what a great guy has been lost, we can make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
“So many plans…”
Having just enjoyed a successful season playing for Sydney semi-professional club Rockdale Ilinden, Dan had gone for trials with other local teams. He was keen to expand his horizons and challenge himself. After impressing and being pursued by a number of clubs, he had just decided to play for Dolls Point FC next season.
“He really did live like every day could be the last,” says Krystal. “At the celebration of his life, his work colleagues were telling me that every Monday he’d come to the office with so many stories it was like he lived thousands of lives.”
Dan Elkayam loved to travel (Krystal Troyano)
“When someone dies too early, everyone says nice things about them,” says his cousin, Dayan D. Oualid. “But in this case he really was all these things. A wonderful man.”
Dan’s brothers Yohan, Roy and Jeremie recall a childhood bonded by sport. “We loved all sports,“ says Roy. “It was frustrating because he was the best at everything.”
An attacker in his youth football days for Le Bourget, he matured into a central defender — moulding himself on his hero Sergio Ramos, who played for his favourite team Real Madrid.
“We were together most of the time,” says Krystal. “Except when he would be in the living room at our own place at 3am or 4am watching Real Madrid games live, shouting and cheering.
“He was obsessed with football. The day we met, we were both living at a hostel and I noticed him around. Then I spoke to him in the kitchen before he went to work one morning.
“I asked him if he would like a beer with me that night. He said he had football but could cancel. It was later I learned he doesn’t like beer and that was the first and last time he has ever cancelled football for anyone.”
Keen to ensure his travelling companion and girlfriend could also be an impromptu team-mate in beach games, Dan has persuaded Krystal to have football lessons.
“I’m Brazilian (from Sao Paulo) and he would say there must be some samba skill in my blood,” she laughs. “He dreamed of going to Rio with me and he wanted to play street football in the favelas.”
Dan also hoped to lift a trophy again for his country. In 2019, he played for a France team at the European Maccabi Games, an international Jewish sports tournament.
France beat England in the final with Dan, one of the youngest players on the pitch, excelling.
“He wasn’t the type of player to be shouting and barking orders, trying to show how strong they are,” says Sam Zarka, 38, captain of the French team. “He was quiet but he was a fierce competitor.”
Dan Elkayam (centre, wearing an outfield top and laughing) was a keen amateur footballer (Krystal Troyano)
The French coach, Pascal Elbaz, wanted Dan to play for his team for many years to come. “He is a little bit shy but when he starts to talk with you, you can see he had a good heart,” he says. “He’s a man who was very open-minded. He would talk with anyone, from any country or background, religion or ethnicity.
“Off the pitch, yes, he was quiet, but on it he was a real warrior. If you had him in the team, it’s better for you. You would go to war with him. He gave the team a lot of confidence. Knowing that we had him in the defence, we knew that if we scored, we’d often win games because we wouldn’t concede.
“I remember during the final in Budapest, we were really exposed on a counter-attack and he was the last man, one-on-one with the forward. He ran back with him and made a tremendous tackle, sliding in and winning it cleanly. It was incredible, really.”
At the 2022 International Maccabi Games, regarded as the Jewish Olympics, Dan played for a French team that reached the semi-final, only to lose to eventual winners Uruguay.
“The games come thick and fast, you’re representing your country and sometimes in the summer in Jerusalem it’s 40 degrees,” adds Sam. “It’s a big challenge for the younger players coming into it for the first time, and you can usually tell whether they’ll handle it and be back for the next games. With Dan, none of us older, more experienced guys had any doubt. He was a great player.
“I was talking to him a couple of months ago and he was confirming he’d be in the squad for the next Games next summer. We were talking about how he wanted to help us go one better and win the final.”
Sam, who is from Paris but lives in Montpellier, is still reeling from events 11,000 miles away last Sunday.
“My sister Sarah has been travelling with work and she was briefly in Australia as well last week,” he says. “She had a couple of days in Sydney and on Saturday she sent us a selfie from Bondi Beach. The next day, the shooting happened. She might have been caught up in it if her plans had even been slightly different.
“My brother sent our family group a video of people running from the shots. Then, later, Sarah sent me a picture of Dan, saying he’d been killed. I had been playing football on Sunday for my club Jacou Clapiers and was having a drink with my team-mates when the message came through.
“I just lost it.”
Sam reflects the fears of Jews around the world amid rising antisemitism, fuelled by conflict in the Middle East.
“As a Jew now, I am not as shocked by this type of event,” he says. “Dan’s faith was important to him. He was a proud Jew. He would have wanted to go and celebrate the first day of Hanukkah with other Jews.
“It’s just so sad. I tell my young son not to tell people he is Jewish. There is a lot of fear.
“The area he’s from in Paris is very multicultural. There are a lot of different religions, Muslims from Africa and Christians and Dan was the type of guy who got along with everyone.
“If you were a good guy and you liked football, he’d get on with you.”
Sam and Pascal are determined to remember Dan as a team-mate and friend. “The team won’t be the same without him and I want to talk about him to keep his memory alive,” says Sam.
“We’re planning to have warm-up jerseys with his picture on them.”
Dan worked as an IT engineer for NBC Universal, and had been offered a sponsorship so he could get a visa to settle in Australia.
His faith was important to him, and he travelled back to France in 2024 to celebrate the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah, with his family, and to Israel in April for Passover.
“We have special memories of these times together,” says Jeremie. “Dan took strength from his identity and Jewishness.
“The last time he was in Israel, he was asking the family where he could go for a kickabout. His cousin Danyel sent him to a children’s pitch with tiny goals and he still stayed to play.”
Back in Le Bourget, Maxime Attia recalls playing Interquartier tournaments for their commune against nearby districts.
“Dan would play for Le Bourget first,” he laughs. “Then he’d be getting calls asking him to go and play for other districts later in the day.”
His competitive nature even extended to scuba diving lessons with Krystal, when he would show his more experienced girlfriend how he had used less of his oxygen than her.
“He beat me at everything,” she says. “On the Wednesday before he died, we went to an arcade together playing video games.
“He was winning every game. I joked that I wouldn’t play against him anymore.”
As they grieve together, Krystal and Dan’s family are bonding through their memories of a special man, a football fan, and a proud Jew who went to celebrate Hanukkah.
They console themselves that he died at the beach, where he felt happiest with sand between his toes and a ball at his feet.