French Team Doctor Puts ‘98 Squad On Doping Book Tour

August 25th, 2010 | by: chris | View Comments

Footballer autobiographies can be found housed under the Dewey decimal system in the eight circle of hell. Where does that put autobiographies by the team doctors of famous teams? Hitchhiking to the ninth, I suppose.

The team doctor from France’s ‘98 World Cup win has made some fairly damning statements regarding the blood samples of France’s World Cup-winning side from 1998. Conveniently, he has a book coming out.

Normally this would seem an absurd money grab with a book on the fore, but Paclet took out the magic word when it comes to questionable sporting practices: Juventus.

Juve were put to trial for doping after numerous accusations in the mid-nineties and a couple of directors were found guilty of administering EPO before finding success in appeals court. Acquitted, but the stigma lingers.

Paclet notes that there were anomalies in certain samples and that this was suspicious, given that some French players had played with certain football leagues, “notably those in the Italian league”.

“Blood tests revealed amomalies for several Bleus just before the 1998 World Cup,” he told Le Parisien.

In reference to midfield stars Zinedine Zidane and Didier Deschamps who both played at Juventus, the doctor said, “it’s public knowledge that there were practices which were borderline, to say the least, at Juventus at that time”.

“I’m not making anything up. Having a high hematocrit level [a measure of red blood cells] did not prove that they took EPO [Erythropoietin – a hormone often used for performance enhancement in sports].

“As there was no proof we didn’t bother them,” says Paclet, the French team doctor from 2004 to 2008. “Nevertheless it can’t be said that if we had pursued the tests we would have found proof.”

However Jean-Marcel Ferret, the French team doctor at the time of the World Cup win says they “found nothing”. He admits there were anomalies regarding the level of red blood cells, “but they were linked to tiredness from the league”, adding that his “conscience is clear”.

Paclet’s suspect timing doesn’t really eliminate the suspect nature of their blood tests when coupled with the original source, though he does seem to imply it was “clubs”, not just Juventus.

However, the fact that The Implosion explodes onto bookstore shelves tomorrow certainly doesn’t seem to make the accusations any less self-serving. One of these days someone is going to make an outlandish, head-turning statement without a book release coming by the end of the month, in turn throwing a cloud on their plausible accusations.

But don’t hold your breath.