“The well-developed health protocol was respected. “ On the steps of the hotel de Rochechouart in Paris – the seat of his ministry -, the Minister of Education, Youth and Sports, Jean-Michel Blanquer, summarized, Friday, March 5, the internal investigation report claimed from the French Rugby Federation (FFR) following the cluster developed within the XV of France. “No one broke it, no one was at fault”, abounded, at his side, the president of the FFR, Bernard Laporte.
Nicolas Sarkozy’s former secretary of state for sports responded to the ministry’s summons after sixteen cases of Covid-19 (twelve players and four staff members, including coach Fabien Galthié) came to halt the good start of the Blues in the Six Nations Tournament (two wins in as many matches). And, above all, after several media have reported a respect to the map of the “health bubble” supposed to protect the team from the pandemic.
“This famous bubble, which in reality is not a bubble but a protocol”, as Bernard Laporte turned it on Friday, has fueled incomprehension and conjecture for two weeks. How, when the Blues were supposed to be isolated from the outside world, could players have been allowed to take to the streets of Rome to enjoy a waffle on the eve of the match against Italy on February 6, as reported? reported The team ? Or how Fabien Galthié, he was able to leave the National Rugby Center of Marcoussis (Essonne) to attend a match of his son?
Welsh player sanctioned for family reunion
“There was a misunderstanding about the notion of a bubble, it is not an enclosed place in which we do not enter and we do not go out”, specified the epidemiologist Roger Salamon, president of the medical commission of the FFR and one of the authors of the internal investigation, at the beginning of the week. During the gathering of the Blues in a hotel privatized by security in Nice, before the start of the Tournament, it was the federation itself which had placed the emphasis on a “Health bubble, with particularly strict controls at entry”.
This definition recalled certain “bubbles” put in place in the previous months, and not very permeable in their daily operation: in the United States, the NBA basketball teams had thus been isolated in Orlando, Florida to end the season. The “Misunderstanding” invoked by the authors of the investigation on the notion of bubble could also be maintained by the fact that at the beginning of the Tournament, the Welsh player Josh Adams was sanctioned by his federation for having participated in a family gathering.
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