Virimi Vakatawa
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Virimi Vakatawa
Virimi Vakatawa (born 1 May 1992) is a Fijian-born French professional rugby union player who plays as a centre or a wing for Bristol Bears and the French national team. Arrived in France in 2010 and having obtained a French passport, he joined the France sevens team in 2014 before playing for the France national rugby union team since 2016 and the Six Nations Championship. In September 2022, he suddenly retired from professional rugby due to a heart condition. On 27th September 2023 it was confirmed that he was returning to Rugby after signing for Bristol Bears. Early life Vakatawa was born in Rangiora, New Zealand on 1 May 1992, before moving to Naluwai, Fiji, his family village in Naitasiri Province. He holds Fijian citizenship and started rugby with his hometown club at 9 years old. He then joined Nasinu Secondary School, a famous rugby playing school in Fiji. He played both rugby league and rugby union before joining the Fiji national under-19 rugby union team at 17 yea ...
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Racing 92
Racing 92 () is a French rugby union club based in suburban Paris that was formed in 2001 with the collaboration of the Racing Club de France and US Métro. They were called Racing Métro 92 between 2001 and 2015, when they changed the name to Racing 92. "92" is the number of Hauts-de-Seine, a département of Île-de-France, bordering Paris to the west, where they play, and whose council gives financial backing to the club. They currently play in the Top 14, having been promoted as 2008–09 champions of Rugby Pro D2. After starting the 2017–18 season at the Stade Yves-du-Manoir stadium at Colombes, where the France national team played for several decades, Racing played their first match at the new U Arena, since renamed Paris La Défense Arena, in Nanterre on 22 December 2017. History Racing Club was established in 1882 (it became Racing Club de France in 1885) as an athletics club, one of the first in France. New sections were regularly added thereafter (17 as of 200 ...
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Racing Métro 92
Racing 92 () is a French rugby union club based in suburban Paris that was formed in 2001 with the collaboration of the Racing Club de France and US Métro. They were called Racing Métro 92 between 2001 and 2015, when they changed the name to Racing 92. "92" is the number of Hauts-de-Seine, a département of Île-de-France, bordering Paris to the west, where they play, and whose council gives financial backing to the club. They currently play in the Top 14, having been promoted as 2008–09 champions of Rugby Pro D2. After starting the 2017–18 season at the Stade Yves-du-Manoir stadium at Colombes, where the France national team played for several decades, Racing played their first match at the new U Arena, since renamed Paris La Défense Arena, in Nanterre on 22 December 2017. History Racing Club was established in 1882 (it became Racing Club de France in 1885) as an athletics club, one of the first in France. New sections were regularly added thereafter (17 as of 200 ...
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BBC Sport
BBC Sport is the sports division of the BBC, providing national sports coverage for BBC television, radio and online. The BBC holds the television and radio UK broadcasting rights to several sports, broadcasting the sport live or alongside flagship analysis programmes such as ''Match of the Day'', ''Test Match Special'', ''Ski Sunday'', ''Today at Wimbledon'' and previously '' Grandstand''. Results, analysis and coverage is also added to the BBC Sport website and through the BBC Red Button interactive television service. History The BBC has broadcast sport for several decades under individual programme names and coverage titles. '' Grandstand'' was one of the more notable sport programmes, broadcasting sport for almost 50 years. The BBC first began to brand sport coverage as 'BBC Sport' in 1988 for the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul, by introducing the programme with a short animation of a globe circumnavigated by four coloured rings. This practice continued throughout the n ...
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2019–20 European Rugby Champions Cup
The 2019–20 European Rugby Champions Cup (known as the Heineken Champions Cup for sponsorship reasons) was the sixth season of the European Rugby Champions Cup, the annual club rugby union competition run by European Professional Club Rugby (ECPR) for teams from the top six nations in European rugby. It was the 25th season of pan-European professional club rugby competition. The tournament began on 15 November 2019. The knock-out stage of the tournament was rescheduled from April and May to September and October 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, with the final, originally scheduled for 23 May 2020 at the Stade Vélodrome in Marseille in France, taking place on 17 October 2020 at Ashton Gate in Bristol. Teams Twenty clubs from the three major European domestic and regional leagues competed in the Champions Cup. Nineteen of these qualified directly as a result of their league performance. The final place was awarded in the following order: # 2018–19 Champions Cup winner, if n ...
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2017–18 European Rugby Champions Cup
The 2017–18 European Rugby Champions Cup was the fourth European Rugby Champions Cup championship (23rd overall), the annual rugby union club competition for teams from the top six nations in European rugby and was the twenty-third season of pan-European professional club rugby competition. The format of the competition began with a play-off qualification round at the end of the preceding season featuring teams from England, France, Ireland and Wales. The winner joined 19 teams already qualified by way of their domestic league position in the pool stage of the competition - a home and away round-robin for five groups of four teams. Following the pool stage, five pool winners, and three highest ranked runners-up, qualified for the quarter-finals of the competition, as the Cup thereafter reverted to a single elimination knockout format. The tournament began on 13 October 2017. The final was won by Leinster on 12 May 2018 at San Mamés Stadium in Bilbao, Spain. This was Leinster ...
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Rugbyrama
Midi Olympique is a French bi-weekly newspaper specializing in rugby, belonging to the La Dépêche group and based partly in Toulouse and partly in Paris. The first edition was published on 2 September 1929, meaning it is one of the oldest French weekly still in existence (after Le Canard enchaîné). Jean-Michel Baylet is the director of the publication and Jacques Verdier the managing director. Nicknamed ''Midol'' or ''le jaune'' (yellow) in reference to the color of the paper is made of, it mainly covers news from rugby, from the professional Top 14 league to the amateur teams of the most modest levels (Fourth Series), and it also devotes a page to rugby league. It was published weekly on a Monday until Spring 2006 when a second edition began to be released each week on Friday. The Monday edition is nicknamed the "rouge" (red) and the Friday the "vert" (green) in reference to the different color used for the nameplate of the two editions. In 1998 Midi Olympique launched its we ...
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2018–19 Top 14 Season
The 2018–19 Top 14 competition was the 120th season of the French domestic rugby union club competition operated by the Ligue Nationale de Rugby (LNR). Two new teams from the 2017–18 Pro D2 season were promoted to Top 14 (Perpignan and Grenoble) in place of the two relegated teams, Oyonnax and Brive. On 27 April 2019, Perpignan were relegated after they lost at home to La Rochelle, condemning the newly promoted side to the drop with three games still to play. It was a truly dreadful season for Perpignan and one of the worst ever by a club in the history of the Top 14 - at one point it even looked like they might go through the whole season without a win but mercifully they finally achieved a victory on 16 February 2019 against Montpellier. They will be joined in 2018–19 Rugby Pro D2 by Grenoble, who lost the relegation playoff game, 22-28, to Brive. Brive and Rugby Pro D2 champions, Bayonne, will play in the 2019–20 Top 14. The Top 14 final was contested between th ...
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L'Équipe
''L'Équipe'' (, French for "the team") is a French nationwide daily newspaper devoted to sport, owned by Éditions Philippe Amaury. The paper is noted for coverage of association football, rugby football, rugby, motorsport, and cycle sport, cycling. Its predecessor was ''L'Auto'', a general sports paper whose name reflected not any narrow interest but the excitement of the time in car racing. ''L'Auto'' originated the Tour de France road bicycle racing, road cycling stage race in 1903 as a circulation booster. The race leader's yellow jersey (french: maillot jaune, link=no) was instituted in 1919, probably to reflect the distinctive yellow newsprint on which ''L'Auto'' was published. The competition that would eventually become the UEFA Champions League was also the brainchild of a ''L'Équipe'' journalist, Gabriel Hanot. History ''L'Auto-Vélo'' ''L'Auto'' and therefore ''L'Équipe'' owed its life to a 19th-century French scandal involving soldier Alfred Dreyfus – th ...
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2017–18 Top 14 Season
The 2017–18 Top 14 competition is the 119th French domestic rugby union club competition operated by the Ligue Nationale de Rugby (LNR). Two new teams from the 2016–17 Pro D2 season were promoted to Top 14 (Oyonnax and Agen) in place of the two relegated teams, Grenoble and Bayonne. It marks the second time in a row that both promoted teams had returned on their first opportunity after relegation (Oyonnax and Agen were both relegated during the 2015–16 Top 14 season). Teams Number of teams by regions Competition format The top six teams at the end of the regular season (after all the teams played one another twice, once at home, once away) enter a knockout stage to decide the ''Champions of France''. This consists of three rounds: the teams finishing third to sixth in the table play quarter-finals (hosted by the third and fourth placed teams). The winners then face the top two teams in the semi-finals, with the winners meeting in the final at the Stade de France ...
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ESPN
ESPN (originally an initialism for Entertainment and Sports Programming Network) is an American international basic cable sports channel owned by ESPN Inc., owned jointly by The Walt Disney Company (80%) and Hearst Communications (20%). The company was founded in 1979 by Bill Rasmussen along with his son Scott Rasmussen and Ed Eagan. ESPN broadcasts primarily from studio facilities located in Bristol, Connecticut. The network also operates offices and auxiliary studios in Miami, New York City, Las Vegas, Seattle, Charlotte, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles. James Pitaro currently serves as chairman of ESPN, a position he has held since March 5, 2018, following the resignation of John Skipper on December 18, 2017. While ESPN is one of the most successful sports networks, there has been criticism of ESPN. This includes accusations of biased coverage, conflict of interest, and controversies with individual broadcasters and analysts. , ESPN reaches approximately 76 million te ...
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Leinster Rugby
Leinster Rugby ( ga, Rugbaí Laighean) is one of the four professional provincial rugby union teams from the island of Ireland and the most successful Irish team domestically. They compete in the United Rugby Championship and the European Rugby Champions Cup. Leinster play their home games primarily at the RDS Arena, although larger games are played in the Aviva Stadium when the capacity of the RDS is insufficient. Before moving to the RDS in 2005, Leinster's traditional home ground was Donnybrook Stadium, in Dublin 4. The province plays primarily in blue with white or yellow trim and the team crest features a harp within a rugby ball, the harp being an ancient symbol of the province found in and taken from the flag of Leinster, although the colours are closer to the flag of the President of Ireland or the Coat of arms of Ireland. Leinster turned professional along with its fellow Irish provinces in 1995 and has competed in the United Rugby Championship (formerly known as the C ...
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