A quick round-up of rugby-related events so you can gauge how mad the city has gone…



I really wanted to avoid talking about the rugby again, but try as one may there’s no avoiding it here at the moment.

So let’s go with a flow a little. Here’s a quick list of some of the stranger rugby-related things going on around town at the moment…

– Saturday 8th September at 6.30pm – a 2 1/2 hour parade/show (that’s, like, even longer than a Harry Potter movie) designed by famed choreographer Philippe Découflé will fill the Stade de France. Over 1,000 locals have been roped in. Poor things.

– A free photo exhibition is being held in the rotunda of metro station Saint Lazare. It lasts for the whole period of the World Cup and shows rugbymen “in action”. The photos were taken on, er, the stage of the Paris opera “giving them a unique and original artistic and symbolic dimension”. Yeah, right.

– You might know that the French rugby team is made up of macho, muscled brutes, but did you know that they also like to get naked? Their 4th nude calendar, Les Dieux du Stade, has just been released with photos by Steven Klein. You can order it here.

– We mentioned the fireworks at La Défense a couple of days ago. Now even the Eiffel tower has been rugbyfied, with green lighting, two white spotlights symbolising the goal posts (or whatever they’re called) and a giant rugby ball suspended in the middle of the structure. Have a look at a great photoset on Flickr here.

Hopefully, that’s the last time I’ll be mentioning rugby on the blog. But, you never know…