Monaco’s very own manga series, Blitz, is set to launch its sixth volume in just two years, finding huge success with an unlikely topic and putting author Cédric Biscay firmly on the map.
Blitz is special in that it also has world famous chess champion Gary Kasparov on board to help keep the chess match scenes relevant and true-to-life. Adding thrilling chess play to manga excitement, Volume Six is sure to become an instant success when it hits the shelves later this month.
Romain Goiran, owner of Ambitious Monte-Carlo, spoke to Monaco Life about boxing through the pandemic, supporting fighters in Cameroon, and reviving the Fight AIDS Cup with sports enthusiast Louis Ducruet.
The stories of Goiran’s multiple ventures are at best punctuated by, at worst, defined by struggle and hardship. The Covid-19 pandemic in particular posed its own set of seemingly insurmountable problems, forcing a complete re-conception of the Ambitious business model, and throwing his Fight Aids Cup project in doubt.
The Fight Aids Cup did, however, go ahead, and Ambitious has adapted and persevered. Ambitious is under the stewardship of its highly-motivated manager Goiran, looking to become a larger player on the global stage whilst seeking to bring a new boxing culture to the Principality.
Crises as opportunities
No phrase sums up Goiran’s reaction to adversity quite like this one: “The best projects come to the fore in times of crisis.” Whilst others were forced to scale-down operations, Goiran was doing the opposite.
Alongside his work for Ambitious, Goiran juggles a range of other responsibilities, most notably his work with Louis Ducruet, Prince Albert’s nephew and the son of Princess Stéphanie of Monaco, which recently yielded the latest instalment of the Fight Aids Cup in the Principality. The aim of their collaboration is simple, as Gorian tells us: “With him, we do the maximum to find projects to bring to Monaco.”
The match itself, which sees Prince Albert II’s Barbagiuans face off against Princess Stephanie’s Cirque FC, existed long-before it became popularised in its current format. “It was a tradition that was an amateur affair at the Stade Didier Deschamps, without press or anything like that. A proper family affair.”
Goiran and Ducruet are responsible for changing that, bringing it to the Stade Louis II and turning it into a mediatised, charitable event for the first time in 2020. Following the cancellation of the event in 2021, the sanitary context in 2022 made the realisation of the second installation questionable once again. “We were told three weeks before that we wouldn’t be able to do it.”
Not only did the event go ahead as planned in January, it was even improved upon. “We told ourselves that the first year was good, but that we could do better. Better is what you saw this year, with an event in two halves, the gala dinner on the one side, the match on the other, as well as welcoming bigger players, bigger stars.”
Boxing through the pandemic
Goiran’s collaborative project with Ducruet isn’t the Monegasque businessman’s only success story of the pandemic. His Ambitious Monte-Carlo business, which he runs with his associate Jean Marc Toesca, has also faced a difficult set of challenges.
In its infancy, Ambitious created networks around sportspeople, the sheer wealth of sports stars and events in and around the Principality bringing in an elite clientele. “A year ago, we had a quarter of AS Monaco professional players,” says Goiran. “We create teams around footballers. We find them an osteopath, a kinesiotherapist, a boxing teacher, a yoga teacher, a dance teacher, a tai chi teacher. That was the business model at Ambitious, before having boxers.”
The business has since diversified its activities. As Goiran succinctly puts it, “Ambitious is an organisation for boxers to support boxing. It isn’t for us, it’s for the boxers.” When the pandemic hit in 2020, Ambitious struggled to continue to fulfil its function. Social distancing and sparring sessions, or indeed fights themselves, don’t exactly go hand in hand.
Although training became feasible after the first lockdown, the lack of prospects for events, and the fragile economic situation of boxers and boxing itself left Ambitious and Goiran in a precarious position. His entrepreneurship, his drive to make the project work and a disused family tennis court in La Turbie would come in handy. “Ambitious is a sporting support service, but we said, in order to survive, we have to be more than that. So, we created our own training camp in La Turbie. We took a tennis court from my family that was never used, we added a military tent and put in a ring. So, we created a boxing camp, which allowed boxers to continue to train.”
Although the training camp in La Turbie facilitated the boxers’ preparation for bouts, the fact remained that there weren’t many fights out there. During the toughest times of the pandemic, the threat to boxers’ careers became an existential one. “If you have an economy that is solid, even in times of crisis, then things can still happen. But the boxing environment in France is ridiculous. The boxers themselves are the ones who have to organise their own galas, it is them who pay. They call their family, their friends for financing. It is them who create their own financial base upon which to fight.”
Larger fighters at Ambitious, like Cameroonian-French boxer Hassan N’Dam, could ride out this difficult period, but others had to look for alternative means of income. “We encouraged the younger boxers to find work, because they simply didn’t have a choice, and we helped them to do that through our partners.”
Monaco and boxing: A more exclusive clientele
Goiran recognised the importance of organising an event, and this was realised during last July’s ‘Chill out on the bay’ event at Villa Calvi. It provided a lifeline for the fight-deprived boxers of Ambitious, with tickets for the high-level event selling for €500. Not only that, it has also inspired Goiran to bring similar events to Monaco. “The Villa Calvi event was a great model that we can replicate in Monaco 100%,” he says.
Goiran sees the potential to go smaller, even more exclusive, as he announced an exciting plan to bring boxing to the skyline of the Principality. “We have visited the rooftops here and we want to propose a project to do small boxing matches, very private, for 15 people, three fights. That is something that we’ll do, we know it’s doable.” This project could soon see the light of day, as he added, “We’ve already found a few places with partners.”
His confidence in this project is unwavering, referencing an already blossoming sports scene in the Principality as well as the successful fights hosted by the Monte-Carlo Casino. “In Monaco everything works, this place is amazing. You have a lot of sports, a lot of different people and nationalities, so of course it can work.”
A global mindset
His ambition for Ambitious isn’t confined to the border that separates the Principality from France. He is already well accustomed to making flights to and from Manchester, where he visits the business’ footballing clients who have made the switch from the Riviera to the UK.
He has now set his sights further afield on the west African country of Cameroon, where his work in collaboration with Ambitious boxer N’Dam aims to serve both a social and sporting purpose.
“What Hassan (N’Dam) explained to us is that there are a lot of good fighters in Cameroon, but they are very poor, so to get a chance to achieve their dream, they have to come to France, but they do so without any money,” Goiran explains. “They sleep outside, they struggle to eat, they don’t have official documentation. So, with some partners in France, we can give money and organise events in Cameroon to fund these top fighters, who could become world champions.”
As Goiran says, Cameroon is a country “rich in great fighters”, the aim of Ambitious’ latest project is therefore to give them the means to shine on a global stage, without constraints. “A boxer should think only about boxing, not about what he has to do to pay for his ticket to get to France, to Italy or elsewhere, about what he will do in terms of accommodation, in terms of food. If this guy really has great boxing potential, he deserves to have partners at his level of boxing.”
Be it through his work with Ducruet or through Ambitious, Goiran’s contribution to Monaco’s sports scene is unequivocal. Pivotal to that success is a fighting spirit, an unerring belief, that he could overcome whatever struggle presents itself, and persevere to make his mark on Monaco’s rich sporting landscape. “You will always have difficulties, there’s always something between yourself and the objective. If it’s easy, it’s a trap.”
SEE ALSO:
Princess Stephanie’s Cirque FC win Fight Aids Cup
Photo of Romain Goiran by Luke Entwistle, Monaco Life
In the laboratories of the Scientific Centre of Monaco on Quai Albert 1er, a group of researchers are studying paediatric cancer. In another section, scientists study cnidarians, otherwise known as corals, medusae and anemones. Extraordinarily, the two have managed to come together to combine their research and potentially unlock the mystery of how and why brain cancers emerge in children.
Dr Vincent Picco is the head of the paediatric cancer research team at the Scientific Centre of Monaco (CSM). In a sun-filled lab with large windows that capture the post-card images of Port Hercule and Monte-Carlo, white-coat researchers work methodically with test tubes. Dr Picco tells me the purpose behind his team’s work.
“The causes of cancer in children are extremely different from adults, because kids have not been smoking and drinking most of their lives, for example,” says Dr Picco. “Our main hypothesis is that during embryogenesis, certain cells that should become neurons or cells that make up the brain remain abnormally locked in an embryonic state.”
The survival rate for paediatric cancers has doubled over the past 30 years, says Dr Picco encouragingly, but not because the treatment has been particularly innovative.
“The chemotherapies used have been around for ever,” he explains. “It is the way they are being used that has improved to increase the survival rate of the patients. But while survival has improved, it has come with very debilitating consequences. One of our main goals is to develop therapies that are more specific towards paediatric cancers, to reduce these secondary effects of treatment and give a better quality of life to the patients, during and after treatment.
“If we understand how and why a cancer emerges, we might be able to design a therapy that is best suited to that cancer.”
In another section of the Scientific Centre, I am introduced to Dr François Seneca, a senior scientist working with cnidarians. He shows me inside a tiny room with a very small fish tank filled with little anemone.
“Here in the lab, we study the innate immune response of aiptasia sea anemone,” he explains. “We are using this species because its genome has been sequenced and it gives us extra information that we can use to study in detail what genes are expressed or regulated during certain conditions, so how the animal defends itself when it’s attacked by a pathogen. The pathogen in this case is vibrio parahaemolyticus, a bacteria that is found in the ocean and, when ingested by humans, causes gastrointestinal illness, more commonly known as seafood poisoning.”
Amidst the complicated scientific terms, I ask how these little ocean-dwelling creatures could possibly help unlock the story behind childhood cancer.
“The really interesting question that we want to address here at the CSM is, ‘What are the mechanisms in corals and anemones that prevent the animal from catching disease’,” he says. “We don’t see tumours developing out of the blue on coral tissues so we think there must be some mechanisms that prevent that from happening. If we can get our head around that, then we can potentially help the biomedical field.”
Cnidarians are indeed fascinating little creatures. Some have a lifespan of around 4,000 years, longer than any other animal that lives in the ocean. When a cnidarian gets damaged, it can regenerate a body part, making them practically immortal. Dr Seneca says he can cut a single sea anemone into a number of pieces, and each will continue to grow and thrive.
“These animals have been through a huge amount of stress due to different environmental changes throughout their lives – excessive energy from sunlight, pollutants, etc., and yet they are still able to survive,” says Dr Seneca.
“We think of coral as being fragile because of what’s happening with climate change and what you see in the news about the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. But at the same time, there’s an inherent resilience in corals. They have been on earth and evolving for over 500 million years. They have the tools, the solutions, to propagate and survive if you give them the chance.”
Dr François Seneca, a Monegasque native, began his research career in Australia with a PHD at James Cook University. It was the first lab in the world to apply new sequencing technology to corals.
“What happened when we started sequencing more and more species of coral is that we discovered how rich they were with gene families and how similar they were from classical models like mice, rats and dogs, all the way to humans,” says Dr Seneca. “Then we discovered that there were genes in corals and anemones that we couldn’t find in classical models. It was incredible, because it had the potential to fill the gaps and present new information to the big picture.”
What also makes cnidarians an exciting research species, says cancer specialist Dr Vincent Picco, is their simple nervous system that is composed of a network of neurons as opposed to a vertebrae nervous system, as in humans. Scientists actually believe that it was probably within this cnidarian group or closely-related ancestory that the nervous system first evolved.
“The simplicity of the animal is very important,” says Dr Picco. “Our aim is to try to simulate paediatric brain cancer in a very simple animal to be able to understand why and how it happens in humans.”
Thanks to innovative sequencing technology, a growing number of laboratories around the world are now starting to use cnidarians to better understand vertebrae, or human biology.
“What we know today is that humans are incredibly complex, and this complexity is what makes us who we are, but it is also tricky to completely understand,” adds Dr Seneca. “So, by looking at an animal that is simpler and has genes that are similar to humans, it can help us decipher that complexity that we see in humans, knowing which genes were there at the time of our ancestors, and diversified and built that complexity that we see today.”
Botanists and chemists have long prospected in tropical forests and other terrestrial ecosystems for unusual substances to meet human needs. But the world’s oceans, which may contain as many as two million as yet undiscovered species, have remained largely untapped.
Using the innate immunity of cnidarians to understand the emergence and treatment of cancer is a growing field. Some cnidarian toxins have already been used for the design of immunotoxins to treat the disease.
“I think that all answers are in nature,” says Dr Seneca. “In the field of biomimicry, if we really want to make huge discoveries and apply them quickly, we have to go back to the solutions that nature itself has created.”
The problem, however, is imitating these solutions on a large scale.
“The potentional in terms of bioactive molecules in the ocean is extremely high because of the diversity of the animals and lifeforms,” says Dr Picco. “The problem is that it is extremely difficult to isolate the compounds from these kinds of animals. Even if the compound is active against cancer, it is extremely difficult to synthesise that compound.”
Dr Picco points to a company called Coral Biome in Marseille that isolated a compound called palytoxin in a particular soft coral, an extremely poisonous substance that is 1,000,000 times more toxic to cancer cells than to healthy cells. Research shows that it is highly effective at targeting in vitro liquid cancers like leukaemia, or solid cancers including brain, lung, prostate and breast cancers.
“But it was not possible to synthesise this compound,” explains Dr Picco. “In order to drive that compound to the clinics they would have to cultivate corals at a large scale and extract it from the animals, and these steps made the project impossible in the end. So, despite a very promising effect of the compound against cancer, they could not reach an industrial and clinical level.”
The paediatric cancer team at the CSM are not at that stage in their research. First, they want to answer the fundamental question of how and why brain cancers develop in children. “We hope to follow that with more pre-clinical, advanced studies based on the basic research and models that we are developing here in the lab, building on the extremely original way we are inducing cancers to model.”
The CSM teams shared their exciting research project at the 15th Monegasque Biennial of Oncology (Biennale Monegasque de Cancerlogie), co-organised by the Scientific Centre of Monaco (CSM) and the Princess Grace Hospital Centre in late January. It was an opportunity for 1,200 professors, doctors, researchers and students to share knowledge and create collaborations with the aim of fighting the leading cause of death for men, and the second cause of death for women.
In the seaside laboratories of the CSM, in the tiny Principality of Monaco, researchers have forged their own alliance, combining two very different fields – anemone gene sequencing and paediatric brain tumours – that will hopefully one day change the lives of these young patients, and help prove that the answers to the modern medical world can indeed be found within the sea.
Photos by Cassandra Tanti, Monaco Life
The government has introduced new air mobility regulation designed to safeguard Monaco’s airspace and the population while boosting the use of unmanned craft like drones in the Principality.
In June 2019, Monaco’s Civil Aviation Department, supported by Air Space Drone, a company that provides the FlySafe digital platform, and MC-Clic, a Monegasque company specialising in the design of drones and aerial photography, inaugurated a new low altitude airspace management system. The Principality therefore became the first country in the world to deploy a specific program relating to drones and other unmanned aircraft.
In order for air mobility to progress, however, safety must be addressed, so Monaco has now introduced a new regulatory framework that aims to ensure better management of its airspace while adjusting national regulations to the technological developments observed in the aeronautics sector.
Professional drone companies will now be able to apply for an annual permit giving them access to Monaco airspace. They must still obtain prior authorisation for each flight though.
Meanwhile, technical and safety equipment are compulsory in an effort to improve the visibility of drones. The craft must, among other things, be equipped with a parachute to limit risks on the ground and better protect the population against an accidental fall.
Authorised drones must also be equipped with a signaling device compatible with the FlySafe platform, which allows for their identification as well as the monitoring of flights on Monegasque territory.
The new regulations became effective on Sunday 6th February when Ministerial Order No. 2021-532 was published in the Journal de Monaco.
SEE ALSO:
Monaco unveils new FlySafe programme
Photo by Jason Blackeye on Unsplash
The OceanoScientific Expedition, headed by explorer navigator Yvan Griboval, has gained another supporter, this time the KSB group.
The OceanoScientific Expedition will see Yvan Griboval embark on a 10,200km journey from Toulon, France, to Antwerp, Belgium, via Monaco on the zero-emission catamaran ‘Love The Ocean’. He will be collecting physico-chemical data at the air-sea interface to assist scientists in studying the components of climate change and chemical and noise pollution.
Is also designed to raise young people’s awareness of sea trades by encouraging them to respect and love the ocean.
In signing the partnership, the KSB group was represented by Bruno Monjoint, Regional Executive Officer KSB Western Europe, and Boris Lombard, President of KSB SAS.
Founded in 1871, KSB is a German group established throughout the world that produces and markets pumps, industrial valves, fluid management systems and offers associated services. For 150 years, KSB has transported all types of fluids in the building, industry, water and energy sectors, on land and at sea.
“We are proud to embark on this ambitious expedition,” said Boris Lombard. “It involves combining oceanographic research and collective intelligence to raise our level of knowledge of the ocean today, in order to act more responsibly tomorrow.”
Dr. Stephan Timmermann, Chief Executive Officer of the KSB Group, added: “Combining ecology, economy and corporate culture is a central and essential subject for us in charting our path towards ecological transition. Investing in research and the acquisition of accessible data makes it possible to share the encouraging prospects of sustainable development with as many people as possible. This is also the responsibility of a major industrial brand like KSB.”
Director of OceanoScientific Expeditions Yvan Griboval thanked the KSB managers for their commitment, saying, “It is important to wear the colours of companies that put industrial technology at the service of the sustainable preservation of Nature’s resources.”
Photo from left to right: Boris Lombard, Yvan Griboval, Dr. Stephan Timmermann and Bruno Monjoint.
Prince Albert II met with Chinese President Xi Jinping on Sunday in Beijing, where the president praised Prince Albert’s Olympic achievements while encouraging more enterprises in Monaco to invest in China.
In a video captured by state media CGTN, Prince Albert II of Monaco is gifted a dough figurine of Bing Dwen Dwen, the Beijing Winter Olympics mascot, at the Great Hall of the People. The head of state then says politely, “Can I ask you a big favour, can I have a second one, because I have twins, so if I only bring back one…”
It is a moment that clearly delighted Chinese President Xi Jinping when the pair met a short time later.
“You chose a pair of lovely Bing Dwen Dwens as souvenirs for your children,” said the president affectionately. “We hope your children will grow up to be as talented and passionate as you about winter sports in the future.”
The relationship between the Chinese President and Prince Albert was strengthened during a state visit to the Principality in 2019. On Sunday, the president reportedly pointed out that since that visit, bilateral ties have moved forward with fruitful results including environmental protection, sports, arts and telecommunication, primarily the joint establishment of a 5G telecom network that covers the whole of Monaco, the first of its kind in the world.
The Chinese president also reportedly stressed that the two countries should consolidate the traditional friendship and political trust, strengthen communication and coordination in the United Nations and other multilateral institutions and international affairs, and jointly safeguard multilateralism.
Meanwhile, President Xi Jinping encouraged more enterprises from Monaco to attend the China International Import Expo in November, to increase investment in China, to actively participate in the Belt and Road Initiative, and explore cooperation in third-party markets.
He also welcomed Monaco’s participation in the second phase of the 15th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity, which will take place in Kunming from 25th April to 8th May.
Prince Albert II said that China’s successful Winter Olympics opening ceremony has sent a strong message of peace and solidarity, which is exactly what the world urgently needs.
Photo source: Xinhua News Agency
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