“There is a page that turns and others that open“, according to the sports journalist, whose voice we recognize among a thousand: Nelson Monfort. After bowing out at the Roland Garros tournament last May, commenting on the Paris 2024 Olympic Games this summer, we learn that the trio he formed with Philippe Candeloro and Annick Dumont to comment on the figure skating on France Télévisions, will no longer be. A decision that he admits to having taken six months ago, “by mutual agreement” and, he adds: “You can sense it from the tone of my voice that it is in complete serenity“.
This announcement generated a wave of messages of affection: “These are not hundreds, but really several thousand messages, he confides, not to mention people in the street, etc. What pleases me is that this trio with Philippe and Annick went beyond the skating stage. We tried to do good to this sport“, he says.
A big step towards comedy
So, he is not completely leaving figure skating since he currently plays in the theater, still with his sidekick Philippe Candeloro, in the play Things are slipping in Tokyo. This fiction, a skating story of course, takes place in the Japanese capital: a French skater who must play for the world title against a Japanese is kidnapped and poisoned by yakuza, who did not see it that way. We find him lifeless in the bathtub of Philippe's bathroom, the day of the competition. A piece with “a whole series of twists and turns and a happy ending, describes Nelson Montfort, and people laugh a lot“. With nearly 15 performances already on the clock, there are around thirty dates remaining until next April, including November 15 in Dugny, in Oise.
It is therefore a new career that “our” Nelson Monfort is embracing, like Jean-Pierre Foucault who recently filmed, or even Stéphane Bern who has become a fictional hero**.** “To be honest, I'm starting to get offers for TV movies and films. I just played in the Bodins film“, he rejoices. He also toured in SEGPA in the mountainshappy films, funny films. “People need to laugh today and that's what I try to offer them very very modestly, very humbly“, he concludes.
