French Swimmer Leveaux's Autobiography Stirs Up Controversy

Only A Game's Bill Littlefield comments on one former swimmer's controversial new autobiography.

I will not be reading the tell-a-lot autobiography of French swimmer Amaury Leveaux for several reasons, and one of them is that I don’t have to.

BBC News in Paris revealed this week that the book by the fellow who won gold at the London Olympics and retired in 2013 includes such gems as “some of us wouldn’t spit at a little line of coke from time to time. For others, it’s not just a little line, it’s a complete motorway covered in white powder which they zoom down at top speed.”

So much for spoilers.

The French Swimming Federation is outraged by those lines, and also by the ones in the book, and probably by Leveaux’s contention that a trainer with the team warned the athletes about when they’d be tested for drugs.

“He was going to do television commentaries,” said French Swimming Federation Vice President Lucien Gastaldello. “He can forget that. Who would speak to him now?”

Touche, eh? I bet Monsieur Leveaux wishes he’d thought of that before he turned author. Now he’s doomed to sit alone in silent bookstores beside piles of Sex, Drugs, and Swimming.