In the midst of a national debate on the sensitive subject of “active assistance in dying”, the sports journalist, Charles Biétry, confide in everyday life The team from Saturday April 8, having prepared his assisted suicide in Switzerland. This former figure of Canal+, who revolutionized the coverage of sport on television, is suffering, at the age of 79, from Charcot’s disease, an incurable disease.
“We organized everything with my wife and my children. I don’t want to be hooked up to a machine to breathe when there’s nothing left, no future. I don’t want to suffer and especially to make my family suffer (…) I registered in Switzerland for assisted suicide, all the papers are signed”he confides.
“You have to take the last pill yourself. This gesture, it’s easy to say “I’m going to do it” when I’m at the seaside in Carnac. When someone hands you the pill and tells you that two minutes later you’ll be dead, it’s not that simple. But in any case, everything is ready »he develops, a few days after Emmanuel Macron announced a bill on the end of life “by the end of summer”.
“It gives a space of freedom”
“It gives a space of freedom to someone, from the moment it is framed”, explains Charles Biétry. In France, “If the doctors don’t want you to disappear, there’s no way today, he adds. Except when it comes to respiratory problems… They are then much more inclined to help you leave. »
In this long interview, the former sports journalist recounts the progression of his disease, which is characterized by progressive paralysis of the muscles, and a life expectancy not exceeding three to five years, once the diagnosis has been made.
“The stages, I know them: lower limb, upper limb, throat and larynx… I’m there”he says. “Then you move on to the first category pass stages with the difficulty, even the impossibility, of swallowing (…) The next stage is the attack on the lungs. (…) When it doesn’t work anymore, I want to stop”.
Charles Biétry also recounts his sports routine which he continues against the advice of his doctors and which, he believes, allowed him to resist the disease for a while. “As I was doing everything to rebuild muscles that were leaving” before the disease is diagnosed, “The disease took a long time to catch on”. “To keep my spirits up, I need sport. The day when I can no longer ride a bike, it will go very quickly”he says.
Charles Biétry has marked the world of sport and the media over the past fifty years by having shaken up the relationship between football and television. Passed by the television channel L’Equipe or BeIn after many years at Canal +, he is also the author of a scoop on the deaths of the Munich Olympics on September 6, 1972, when he was a reporter for the ‘France Media Agency.