Fabien PELOUS

Biog of Fabien PELOUS :

By the end of his career Pelous had 118 caps to his name - but he had taken quite a few knocks along the way. They say you need some knocks to stir the pride and keep the competitive edge alive and Fabien Pelous certainly received his share. Take 2001, when the French team flew off to South Africa without him (he had already been selected 61 times by that time). On 7 April of that year he captained the team that had gone down 48-19 at Twickenham. His second French Championship title with Stade Toulousain would change nothing. He was exhausted and had had enough. He lost the captaincy and was not selected again for les Bleus until the following year, when not only was he not appointed captain, but he was named as a replacement.

And then, on 2 March 2002, a stand-out day at the Stade de France that saw the English automatons out of their depth against a French team hungry for revenge and playing expansive rugby, Fabien Pelous came on to the pitch. Wearing the number 18 shirt for the third time, he took up his place in the second row, and within minutes had flattened Graham Rowntree. You can’t sum up a match or career in one tackle - but almost. The images of the Leicester loose-head prop hitting that brick wall played in loop and in slow motion in his head and on the television screens. Pelous was back, combative, jaw clenched, head down - the Pelous of old. He was not an exceptional ball carrier - although he could pass the ball (remember Saint André’s try against the All Blacks at Toulouse in 1995? Pelous made the overlap!) - nor a great runner, but more of a traction engine, a bulldozer whose mere passage shook the ground.

Apart from a second tour of South Africa (in 2005) and a few matches here and there, Pelous was ever-present for les Bleus from then on, being named on the bench just five more times, and then only for minor fixtures. He didn’t see it quite so simply himself. On the eve of the World Cup, commenting on the fact that Philippe Sella, whose appearance record (111) he was about to beat, had compared him to a rock, he said “It was true until two years ago. Since then I’ve had a lot of injuries and bad luck”. But his 112th match, against England in Marseille on 18 August, proved he was back to his best. Again.

Pelous was a big man. At birth he weighed 4 kilos and measured 56cm and by the time he was 12 years old he was 1.80m tall; his great-grandfather had been a 2m giant of his time. Pelous would grow to 1.98m himself, weighing over 110 kilos. He was a girder, a load-bearing wall whose appetite for challenges was whet by arm-wrestling contests with his father, a wall that in the end would support the French team during four Grand Slams (1997, 1998, 2002, 2004) in which he played every game (a record) and Stade Toulousain in three French Championships (1999, 2001, 2008), and two European Cups (2003, 2005)*. Not to forget a World Cup Final (1999) and victories against the major nations, the last a memorable occasion against the All Blacks in the quarter finals of the 2007 World Cup.

He should have been at the helm for his third World Cup campaign but Raphael Ibanez, who Pelous captained 22 times and was captained by 30 times, was selected instead. Pelous, who had been captain on 42 occasions (a French record !) and part of the French team for 12 years, was back in the ranks again. He did not see this as a problem as long as he could do his job. The harshness of his father’s life, working the land, had taught him to keep his feet on the ground, helping him to become the second most capped player in the world behind Gregan, the Australian (134 caps), and to jointly hold (with Ibanez) the record for the most captaincies of the French team.

Today Pelous is a rugby pundit for Canal+, a member of the French selection committee and manager of France A.

* With Toulouse he was also on the losing side in two French Championship finals (2003, 2006) and two European Cup Finals (2004, 2008).