Life will definitely have put Matthieu Lartot to the test. If the sports journalist has succeeded in realizing his dreams, he has come a long way. Indeed, at the age of 16, he discovered that he had a very rare cancer in his knee, un synovialosarcome. The world then fell apart for this Rugby enthusiast who was considering joining a sport-study program at the time.
“It is an extremely rare cancer. When I was diagnosed in 1997, there were 15 cases in France and it took some time to make this diagnosis. After this shock (an injury that occurred during a match, editor’s note)the surgeon who operates on me says that in ten or fifteen days, I will be able to start running again. I try to run but I have terrible pain, I can’t do it. In fact, the cyst hadn’t gone away. The mass was still there“, remembers Matthieu Lartot in A Sunday in the countrysidebroadcast Sunday October 20 on France 2.
And what could have been treated ultimately required another, more radical operation. “I go back to the billiard table, the biopsy reveals the synovialosarcoma and there it’s a shock because it tells you that he made a mistakedespite himself. He shouldn’t have touched that tumor, or at least not the way he did. He removed the tumor and by doing so carelessly, cancer cells were able to spread everywhere. There, it becomes very problematic, very urgent“, he reported. As a result, the same day, Matthieu Lartot learned that he must now “remove the entire knee as a whole” : “They’re going to give me a massive restructuring prosthesis. I’m going to have to remove 10 centimeters of my femur because I have to take precautions and cut high. I am entering into something that will handicap me and that completely calls into question everything I imagined and the projection I had about my future.“.
Four operations and forty radiotherapy sessions…
Two and a half years of hell awaited him before he became independent. “Between the moment I was diagnosed and the moment I came out of this tunnel, there were four operations and forty radiotherapy sessions, chemotherapy, four months in septic wardand this very strong feeling of injustice“, he emphasizes. Fortunately, Matthieu Lartot later managed to find a new life objective: sports journalism.
Remember that in 2023, everything changed again for him with the recurrence of his cancer. And this time, Magalie’s husband and father of their two children did not escape amputation. After a long rehabilitation, however, he managed to return to the air just in time to commentate on the Rugby World Cup.
