Aaron Grandidier Nkanang

Aaron Grandidier-Nkanang scored the decisive try in the Olympic sevens final on 27 July 2024, running sixty metres in support of Antoine Dupont to put France ahead of Fiji. France won, and it was the first gold medal of their Games.

Wing at Pau, 1.86m and 92kg, and 26 years old.

He was born in London to an English father of Nigerian descent and a French mother who is a sculptor, grew up in Kent and went to St Olave’s Grammar School. He found rugby at eleven, gave it up for basketball at fourteen, and did not play club rugby until he was seventeen, in the English third division at Old Elthamians.

Sevens found him rather than the other way round. The English sevens academy near the university where he was studying graphic design needed players for a development tournament in Italy. That took him to a tournament at Marcoussis, where he met people in French rugby, and to Brive at nineteen ahead of offers from Toulon, Castres and Oyonnax.

Fifteen-a-side rugby did not follow. Seven matches in three seasons at Brive across three competitions is the whole of it. What did follow was seventeen tries across the first three legs of the 2022-23 World Series, a total matched only by Samoa’s Vaa Apelu Maliko.

Pau signed him for 2024-25 to replace Samuel Ezeala, and he chose them because their game suits wingers. Four tries in nine Top 14 matches followed, plus one in Europe, in a first proper season of fifteen-a-side rugby at 24.