Schwazer case, we saw the Netflix docuseries. Here’s why watch her (while Alex points to Paris 2024)

There is a very thin hope, almost imperceptible and yet it resists. Alex Schwazer at Paris Olympics, thanks to a penalty reduction compared to the disqualification end date of 8 July 2024, incompatible with a qualification. A hope that borders on dreams, but this story of victories, falls, doping, redemption, love, fight against invisible powers is about to take off towards all parts of the world. Towards the 195 countries of Netflix, which from April 13 will offer on its platform “The Alex Schwazer case”, a 4-episode docuseries produced by Indigo Stories. By transporting the techniques and the narration already used in formats such as The Last Dance, Formula 1: Drive to Survive, Breakpoints. A global diffusion, never so wide for an Italian athlete, which hopefully will also generate a wave in favor of the penalty discount.

So here’s Alex wide-eyed in a room ominously backlit by two windows in the background, talking about his depression after the gold medal in Beijing and his fall into the hell of doping. And the tears, but also the silences of the ex-girlfriend Caroline Kostner, and the always harsh words against the world institutions of sport by Sandro Donati, champion of the fight against doping, who first pointed out Schwazer’s suspicious behavior to Wada before the 2012 Olympics, then took the athlete under his wing who was looking for redemption and a method by which to demonstrate his cleanliness to the world. He did not serve to prevent the disputed disqualification before Rio 2016, for which the investigating judge of the Bolzano court Walter Pelino ordered the dismissal of the criminal proceedings against the walker for “not having committed the crime”, speaking of “altered urine samples in order to make them test positive and therefore to obtain the disqualification and discredit of the athlete and his coach Sandro Donati”. A move that the international institutions have not accepted, not accepting an act of ordinary Italian justice. “Schwazer could not have imagined what consequences my actions would have on him” says Donati, who has always been convinced that he was paying for “a history of doping which is also a history of complicity by the CIO, international federations, with the approval of governments which have never wanted to elaborate. Today the situation is always the same: it camouflages itself, it blends in”. Almost as if it were a warning, in the series the images of the years in which doctors practices come out of the Rai archives Conconi And Ferrari they were exalted and produced victories in bursts.

Today Schwazer trains amateur athletes, but is still very dry. As rarely happens to an ex. “I’ll never stop being an athlete,” he said to hyenas. Of the anguish of the period in which he was disputed from one transmission to another, of the suicide attempt, no trace remains: “He is serene after having gone through terrible periods, he has never expressed hatred towards those who struck him down, which instead those people deserve” underlines Donati. The docuseries was an opportunity to bring back whole years of his life, in front of a camera during sessions lasting up to ten hours a day. He heard the voices of his Russian opponents telling him about their day: “Training-vitamins-doping”. He reviewed the worst moment, Rio 2016, on the cycle path while awaiting the eight-year disqualification sentence, but he also understood certain invisible dynamics: “My wife told me she was pregnant before I left for Rio, life called me , pushed me to move: this was my therapy”. The defense of him, supported together with key figures of his career as a lawyer Gerhard Brandstaetter or the manager Julia Mancini.

“This story struck us, we needed to understand and get to the bottom of it,” he says Alexander Lostiaproducer of Indigo and engine of the docuseries together with John Bossetti, Italian manager of Netflix non-fiction content. It’s a story full of elements useful for facing life, they reason to Netflix, convinced of a formula in which the investigation and suspicions are part of the narration but they are not the only lifeblood of a story in which tears and competitive spirit are mixed. “Today I wouldn’t take any more drugs” Schwazer sighs, “I would take a break, but it wasn’t used at the time. I have great regret for making certain choices. I would have preferred a different ending for this docuseries: but if my story had been any other, there wouldn’t even have been a series about me.”