Vivre Le Stade! I’m smitten by fabulous stadium
RUGBY MATTERS
IT has taken decades to fall in love with the Stade de France – no coup de coeur for me – but I am now completely smitten by that remarkable stadium in Paris, the home of French rugby and so much more besides, most recently the Olympics.
For a long time, I was indifferent, indeed resentful. I pined for my ex. The Stade wasn't my beloved Parc des Princes, that riotous bearpit of an arena, that theatre of dreams and nightmares. The train service to Saint Denis from the city was inadequate and for night time matches invariably stopped before you had finished work, leaving you stranded.
The press seats were designed for 12-year-old kids and the jobsworth authorities inexplicably locked the gates at midnight, often necessitating a climb over the spiked 10-foot wire fence to access the road to flag down a random taxi. Often forlornly. Myself and Tony Ward once painfully scaled the ramparts at 1am to get out and instinctively started whistling the Great Escape together as we landed on terra firma the other side.
It was always perishing cold, and the shadows sliced through the stadium dramatically turning night into day and vice versa. The food was rubbish or non-existent or three days old and the crowd was often sullen and moody. There was little to cheer in French rugby for much of the noughties and parts of the decade that followed. The hordes that had travelled from the south west, at considerable expense, were not impressed and made their views known.
Everything was wrong. Even that strange angular geometric alignment of those big seating blocks used to bother me more than it should, an optical illusion almost. It was all a bit unsatisfactory and unsettling.
But gradually the stadium built its rugby legacy and mythology. Jannie De Beer's five dropped goals, BOD's hat-trick, a crazy 35-34 Wales win, England's win at the 2007 World Cup semi-final against France, the final itself, Johnny Sexton's remarkable dropped goal to clinch another famous Ireland win, an extraordinary high octane win over New Zealand in 2021 when Romain Ntamack toyed with the All Blacks to the delight of a nation.
I forgot its faults and revelled in the sheer enduring majesty of the Stade. Modern looking, even today, brilliant sight lines for all 80,000 paying spectators. It became noisier and more passionate; France gave the faithful something to shout about. The ambience changed, the food became edible, the trains more user friendly.
And now over this last year the Stade has been in her magnificent, beguiling, sensuous pomp. A brilliant Rugby World Cup venue, again, and a sensational centre piece for the 2024 Olympics. Packed houses on all six days for the Sevens and then exhilarated capacities for every single athletics session over nine days. Even when that Olympics closing ceremony was dragging more than a little you could just bathe in its floodlit twinkling beauty.
