In the archives of Match

“I haven’t talked about it for a long time. I couldn’t. Too many questions, no answers. That was thirty years ago and I think about it every day. I hear an ambulance in the distance, I think about it. I meet a paraplegic, I think about it. We can tell all we want, be the strongest, the most beautiful, have a wife, children, grandchildren, nothing will make us forget this story.

That evening, I have to comment on the semi-final of the Coupe de France Bastia-Marseille for France Inter. At the podium, I do not notice anything. It moved a little, no more… I remember the technician’s last words in Paris: ‘You open at 8:30 p.m.’ After that, nothing. The seven people sitting to my left are dead. Same fate for the seven on my right. The technician who accompanied me, Michel Mottier, is also lifeless.

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Bastia in the semi-final of the Coupe de France at home, it was a dream. But the event turns into a nightmare

Lying on the ground, I alternate between the phases of awakening and coma. Powerless, I see a guy take my satchel, my bracelet, my chain and my cross. Three days later, he comes to the hospital to bring them to me. It was Jeannot Vincenti, a former Bastia player from the 1960s and 1970s. He recognized me and wanted to protect me from thefts. We saw each other again twenty-five years later in Ajaccio, we kissed but we didn’t say a word. We could not.

Hospitalized in Bastia, I was repatriated in absolute urgency to the Pitié-Salpêtrière in Paris, thanks to Professor Léon Schwartzenberg, a friend. I was 44 years old and had two children: Clémentine, 6, and Baptiste, 1, who took his first steps in the hospital corridor. At night I cried thinking he would have another father if I died. My mother and father, already very ill, left Calais for a seedy hotel opposite the hospital to see me every day. Michel Platini was also very present. On Sundays, when I was on leave, I went either to my house or to his, in Saint-Cloud.

The lawn of the Armand-Cesari stadium is transformed into a field hospital. The victims are evacuated, most often by helicopter, to hospitals in Corsica and on the continent. © SIPA

The collapse of the north stand will leave 19 dead and 2,357 injured

I often think of the dead and the paralyzed. Since that day, I have a debt. I wanted to surpass myself more. To do things that are out of the ordinary, to honor this chance to have stayed alive. I wanted the listeners to be happy… I didn’t stay in contact with any victims. As I never got involved in the trial. It was painful enough as it was, I didn’t want to come back to the arena.

Thirty years later, I still haven’t set foot in Bastia, let alone Furiani. I’m not ready. I would love to, though. One day I will go, surrounded by people I love. No one will know.”

* The journalist joined Europe 1 in December 2021.

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