Charles Biétry, a former Canal+ journalist who has done the big hours of sport, has Charcot’s disease, a terrible degenerative disease that deprives him of his mobility and now prevents him from speaking. In an interview with 7 to 8 on TF1 with an unprecedented appeal to artificial intelligence, he confides in his fight, his suffering but above all his love for life, laughter and loved ones.
He repeats that he wants to fight for “the other patients”, those who cannot or no longer. For his relatives too, who accompany him every day. It is an overwhelming and extraordinary testimony that Display this Sunday Biétry, a former legendary sports journalist of Canal+, delivered this Sunday on Sunday, in the program 7 to 8 on TF1.
Affected by Charcot’s disease – diagnosed in 2022 – Charles Biétry walks hard using crutches and struggles to eat. He especially lost the use of his voice. He therefore accepted an unprecedented device: after having received the editorial issues in writing, the former journalist sent his answers, which were recorded in audio with a voice recreated by artificial intelligence.
“I have a few weeks or months left to live, why do you want me to spoil them and to spoil the life of my loved ones?”
He tells his “torture” in this body that he can no longer completely master: “a torture, yes that’s about that. The words are in my head and I can’t get them out. So we curl up And we may no longer have contact with the outside. Take advantage and do everything in my power to help research and other patients. Blues, it is she who brings us back to a sentence that has become mythical in the family: ‘We will laugh to the end’.
-“The disease gives me an appointment with death. Not sure that I come”
Laughter, selflessness, sport also make him hold, for him but especially for those around him and for other patients. “I go out quite a bit compared to the friends who are in a chair. I have no more balance but with two English canes, I have 200 meters every day. And four times a week, 30 minutes of bicycle By avoiding the falls that have already led me seven times to the hospital. Abdominal by which food will be introduced.
“I am at war with the disease,” he continues. “Sport helps me every day to hate defeat. I know that I will lose one day. But for those around me, for other patients, I have to fight. And the Bretons, it’s true, are a people who never give up. […] The disease gives me an appointment with death. Not sure I come. I will fight again. “
Charles Biétry, now 81 years old, was director of sports at AFP in 1980, before joining the Canal+group. He will have held the same functions in France Télévisions in the early 2000s. In 2012, he was appointed director of the BeIN Sport channel.
