Marie Bochet, eight-time Paralympic champion, publishes her autobiography

Serene, Marie Bochet waited until she was serene before carrying out this priestly-like exercise. At the end of her career, which ended last March, crowned with eight Paralympic and 22 world titles, she decided to retrace the course of her first 30 years of existence. From her birth with a malformation of the left forearm, to her first outings on skis, through the triumphs of Sochi and Pyeongchang, but also the failure of Beijing or her iconic status, the Savoyard gives herself up without retained for 324 pages which she hopes will be useful for the new generation.

Why did you feel the need to write this book? Was this a way for you to digest your sporting retirement more easily?

It is not necessarily a post-career project, it was rather an end-of-career project which accompanied me in the last months of this adventure and which also accompanied me in this reflection. It's quite complex for a top athlete to end his career. When my publisher offered it to me for the first time, it was in 2019, I was 25 years old, I didn't really know what I was going to be able to tell in this book, I didn't necessarily have the impression that my life still had real interest in being shared. And then finally I found the title quite quickly and what was worth writing about.

“I wanted to have a beautiful object to also pass on to future generations.”

What did you want to tell through this book? Did you want to send a message?

I wanted to make these 15 years of career and these 30 years of life very concrete. I wanted to have an object to remember all of that and, I think, perhaps to be able to build more serenely afterwards. I wanted to have a beautiful object to also pass on to future generations, to ultimately tell all these aspects of my life because I was the only one who really knew what it was made of, it was a bit of a quest. personality that guided the beginning of the writing of this book. And then, finally, as I wrote, there were a lot of things to share, I began to take a step back which allowed me to draw some lessons about my career at the high level, the learning that could be interesting to share. There are several, and I think this book goes further than a simple chronological account of sporting events.