"There are a lot of athletes from the World Military Games who have been very sick." On March 25, during an interview with the local TV channel Loire 7, Élodie Clouvel took no detour. The pentathlete, who was part of the French delegation invited to participate in the Wuhan Games in October 2019, then explained that she had probably contracted Covid-19, as did many members of the delegation, relying in particular on the words of a military doctor met during 2020.

Élodie Clouvel's testimony had not been massively relayed at the time, but similar new declarations within several military sports delegations have revived debates on the origin of the virus. On the RTL radio antenna, Luxembourg swimmer Julien Henx, for example, said that two of his teammates fell ill during the competition. "There were 200,000 Chinese volunteers there, who returned home in the evening and could very well have transmitted the virus to them," he said in particular.

In the same vein, the French channel BFMTV reports the detailed testimony of a French soldier, anonymous this time. He explains in detail the symptoms of the disease he contracted on his return to France, at the very end of October: bedridden for three days, with fever and breathing difficulties. And several of his teammates would have faced the same complications.

Doubts in the absence of tests

But within the delegation, opinions differ. Skipper Aloïse Retornaz, interviewed by Ouest France, does not hide his skepticism. "This story of contamination of a person, I do not believe it at all [...] If athletes had been infected there, I think they would have talked about it before." Athletes who, it is reported from the military side, have not been tested and are unlikely to be tested.

The Military World Games, which brings together nearly 10,000 athletes from 100 different countries, took place from October 18 to 27, almost three weeks before the first officially recognized case of Covid-19, which China set for November 17. .

It is in any case not the first time that the flagship sporting event of the military world has been linked to the coronavirus pandemic, since on March 12, the spokesman of the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs Zhao Lijian had suggested that the virus could have been introduced by the US military on this occasion.

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