Fabien Galthié has on several occasions left the health bubble set up around the France group.

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FRANCK FIFE / AFP

Quite honestly, we don't even know where to start because the latest revelations from L'Equipe about the health bubble around the XV of France seem unreal.

In the middle of the “Cluster Gate” after the discovery of a dozen cases of Covid-19 in its ranks, the French team, and in particular its leaders, today find themselves on the dock for having to many times pierced the health bubble.

But hey, to talk about a health bubble, you still have to know what we are talking about.

However, to hear the president of the Fédé Bernard Laporte on Friday on RMC, we say to ourselves that we are not out of the brambles.

After curtly lecturing a journalist on the very concept of a bubble ("You make a terrible mistake! What does it mean to respect the bubble? You don't know what that means."), Laporte explained how they had wandered around Rome, he and the players, on the eve of Italy-France.

“At one point, myself and some players went for a walk around town wearing masks, that doesn't mean breaking the bubble,” he said.

To break the bubble would be to go to a place where people can infect you when you don't have a mask.

Our tennis friends at the Australian Open and NBA basketball players have to turn around in their sneakers.

Maracineanu demands answers

Asked on the L'Equipe channel about this small Italian walk of the XV of France, the Minister of Sports Roxana Maracineanu, who also asked the FFR to investigate the reasons for such a health and sports fiasco, a a completely different definition of what a sanitary bubble should be: “A bubble, you have to be careful not to come out of it.

If we get out of it, we can only come back under certain conditions.

In the protocol that was presented to us, there are very strict conditions for exits and returns in the bubble.

You have to be tested when you return to the bubble.

Have Sunday walkers been?

Questioned by our colleagues from

L'Equipe

, the FFR preferred to remain silent while awaiting the conclusions of the famous internal investigation.

What is certain now is that the concept of sanitary bubble has never been really respected, and this since the end of last year.

Internally, we are even starting to say that it is

“a miracle”

if the Covid has not knocked on the group's door in the fall, “so much the behavior was not exemplary”, write our colleagues.

Like this night trip by coach Fabien Galthié in a festive district of Paris, without a mask it seems, two days before the match against England.

Bernard Laporte's threats

On his return from Italy on December 7, this same Galthié had allowed himself to break the rules again by leaving his group after the victory in Rome to go see his son play with the Stade Français Espoirs against Colomiers at the Jean stadium. -Bouin.

A getaway that wouldn't have much more in-house either.

Today, this affair has created an atmosphere that seems deleterious within the group, to the point that some wonder if the XV of France version Galthié will recover from it soon.

But far from calming the game, President Laporte would have preferred threats to diplomacy and the search for truth.

According to many witnesses quoted in

L'Equipe

, he explained to the players before their departure from Marcoussis that it would go wrong for them if they ever decided to leak information.

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