It is January 2024. In the mazes of the Bell Center in Montreal, we accidentally come across Petr Svoboda who is going to the Salon des Anciens, this place reserved for retired players who once wore and did honor to the Canadian jersey .
Director of hockey operations at the Lausanne Hockey Club until November 2022, the Czech has remained silent since he was forced to sell his shares in the LHC, leave these functions and flee the Olympic capital, escaping the feathers and tar.
We address him, we (re)introduce ourselves to him and we ask him a very simple question: how are you, Mr. Svoboda? “I have so much to tell you that, here, between two doors, in the middle of all these people, it is not ideal. Are you free tomorrow?” We agree to meet in a restaurant in a hotel in the Quebec metropolis. We spend six hours at the table, six hours of discussion sometimes interrupted by the sporadic appearance of fifty-year-olds eager to complete their autograph collection.
In Montreal, where he took part in the 23rd conquest of the Stanley Cup with the Canadian in 1986, Petr Svoboda is a man respected, even adored by the generation of gray or very balding temples.
We see each other again two days later in his Montreal apartment. We met several times across the Atlantic in the following 11 months. We talk regularly on the phone, sometimes by videoconference.
Over the course of the meetings, we get to know a person who is outgoing, courteous, teasing, funny, intelligent, educated, diplomatic, talkative. Very talkative. Very very talkative.
But, for the moment, for legal reasons, we cannot report what he told us. We have to check and we’re working on it.
But, as is often the case in such cases, there is another version of the facts. Maybe another truth…
