À revers

Both investigation and coming of age novel, Backhanded takes us inside the brutal world of high-level sports. Between parental ambitions, sacrificed youth and the slippery slide into illegality, we discover the implacable mechanisms of a fascinating world. In Paris in the early twenty tens, a sports journalist and specialist in doping, knows a bit too much and can no longer tolerate the omerta that rules over the world of tennis: because it is haughtily considered an art form more than a sport, everyone, all the way to the top, pretends that tennis is exempt from doping while the entire sport is now infested. When Fred notices Masha, age 14, daughter of Ukrainian immigrants and a young tennis champion who is a bit too lucky, he is certain she is doped. He decides to undertake a fast-paced investigation to the source of the problem and shatter the silence surrounding doping in the world of tennis. In this story, everything is dysfunctional: parents behave like children and children are forced to become adults. A chilling foray into one of the greatest plagues of contemporary sports..