Nearly 30 years after the events, Marie-George Buffet returned to one of the biggest controversies that marked the preparation of the French team before the 1998 World Cup. Minister of Sports from 1997 to 2002, she spoke in the documentary BFMTV “Zidane, the making of a legend” about the unexpected anti-doping control carried out during the Blues training camp in Tignes in 1997. At the time, Aimé Jacquet, the players and the French Football Federation had strongly contested this operation, going so far as to make the doctor responsible for the samples wait several hours, before the tests ultimately turned out to be all negative. “It was so violent that at one point I asked myself if I was going to hold on”confides the former minister today.
The documentary also returns to the statements of the former doctor of the Ministry of Sports Alain Garnier, who claims to have received instructions not to carry out any more unannounced checks on the Blues until the end of the World Cup. A version that Marie-George Buffet now partly recognizes. “If Doctor Garnier says it, yes, it’s true. He is an honest man. We didn’t say it like that but it comes down to the same thing. This is a step backwards. We resumed the fight after the World Cup. » She specifies, however, that this decision did not come directly from the Prime Minister, Lionel Jospin. “We had to be given instructions at the office level. It’s not the Prime Minister himself. »
