London-born Grandidier now loving life in France

A LATE bloomer having joined his first rugby club at 17, London-born Aaron Grandidier has gone on to sign for Top 14 side Brive and is now a France Sevens international.

Grandidier discovered rugby at St Olave’s Grammar School in London in age 11 but was “pretty rubbish” at first.

But after developing his footwork through basketball and working on game understanding, he made it into the Kent U18 county team.

The full-back then made it into the London & Southeast team before quickly progressing into England Counties and in 2017 joined his first rugby club Old Elthamians.

Despite progressing through the regional and national age grades, Grandidier went unnoticed by academies. He started to look at avenues outside of rugby before an opportunity came that he couldn’t refuse.

He said: “I was meant to go to Loughborough to do design, completely unrelated to the rugby, and just before going my home club set up a pathway where there was going to be a university linked to the club.

“It was a free ride to St Mary's University in Twickenham, so

I decided to go for that and played for the university and in National 1 for OA's.”

Having become frustrated at being overlooked by English academies, Grandidier, right, teamed up with rugby agency Inside Rugby and being eligible for France through his French mother, he explored opportunities across the Channel.

After playing for England’s 7s development team he signed for Brive’s academy and quickly caught the eye of the French national team.

He said: “The France 7s team got word that I'd come over and remembered me from playing against them for England and decided to test me out in December 2019 in their development side. It went well and I played with them in South Africa in February 2020.”

Grandidier made two Challenge Cup appearances for Brive in the 2020/21 season but has played throughout this campaign for France’s 7s team scoring 14 tries on the World Series circuit.

He said: “I'm absolutely loving it. The biggest crowd I played in front of was the most recent Twickenham one where on the Saturday there was 40,000+ people and for me growing up, starting to watch rugby I've always dreamt of playing at Twickenham.

“It was quite funny playing for France instead of England, but it was an insane feeling.

“I'm happy with my progression. It's been a bit of a shaky start adapting to the nerves, but I think I've just been getting better with experience and have had a lot of help from the coaches and senior players.

France are currently seventh in the World Series standings with the final leg next month in Los Angeles and Grandidier sees their campaign as a mixed bag.

He said: “For us it's bittersweet as we've shown we're able to compete with the big teams. We got our first podium of the year in

Toulouse which we were over the moon with but we're still searching for that tournament win and for us we feel we're really not far from it, we just have a

couple things to iron out.

“There's a lot of great stuff and a lot to

work on.”