In the bookshop “After the finish line”, the walker’s autobiography: “I lied to Carolina, I felt good with her because her loneliness was like mine”
“I was a junkie, I used to go to Turkey to dop myself”. Nine months from the filing of the criminal proceedings for doping started on the eve of the Rio 2016 Olympics and six months after the ‘no’ from the Lausanne Court that denied him the Tokyo Games, Alex Schwazer publishes his autobiography for Feltrinelli, ‘After finish line‘, a “story of falls and redemptions, of renunciations and rebirths”.
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This time no insinuation, the words come directly from the South Tyrolean walker and tell the story of a man who today, at 36, feels he has closed an important cycle of his life: “Innsbruck-Vienna, Vienna-Antalya. I told Carolina Kostner and my parents that I would go to Rome, to FIDAL – writes the South Tyrolean – I kept my cell phone on even at night, to prevent the Turkish telephone company from sending the message. I was already thinking as an addict. Or rather, I was unreasonable. And I was ready to lie, because taking drugs also means lying ”.
“Anyone who wants to read the biography of a sinless man must choose another one, not mine” explains Schwazer, who also talks about the ex-partner Carolina Kostner: “He sent me a message to invite me to a party in Ortisei, for the silver in Gothenburg. his first, true, great success. We still didn’t know each other. I replied that I had to train and, in order not to make a bad impression, I offered to go and see her in Turin. After a pizza and two bottles drank almost alone, I spilled the drink on her. We made it five in the morning. We were in tune. My loneliness was very similar to hers “.
“When I hit rock bottom, I wondered how I got into that situation – writes the walker in his autobiography – That day marked the rebirth of the man I had inside and who for a long time hadn’t found space to get out. That day I realized that I was in an immense and apparently dead-end labyrinth, in which I had been groping for years. A labyrinth in which I had lost everything. The person I was, my girlfriend, the credibility, the dignity. Only now have I gotten out of it. I survived an ambush, a devious and cruel plot that at other times would have annihilated me. Even today, five years later, I don’t know how I managed to keep my balance. This is the story I want to tell ”.
Of the book he wrote, Schwazer also spoke in an interview with Courier Veneto: “Maybe last summer, with the legal acquittal and the no to the Olympics, something snapped inside me and I decided to close the deal with the past. I felt ready. I gave the book to Sandro (Donati, ed.), My coach, to Gerhard (Brandstätter, ed.), My lawyer, clarifying immediately: don’t expect a book of inquiry because I only talk about my life. I would not have been able to find the motivation to write fifty pages about how I won in Beijing, about doping or about what happened in Rio in 2016. Many crucial points in my story have been deliberately soft: I did not want my autobiography to contain thoughts of hatred and resentment. I didn’t give space to the people who hurt me or who got on the winner’s chariot and then got off as soon as things went wrong”.
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