Iosefo Masi

Iosefo Masi won Olympic gold with Fiji’s sevens side at the Tokyo Games, silver at Paris three years later, and the World Cup Sevens in between. He played no rugby at all as a child. Football was the only sport he cared about.

Centre at Lyon, 1.90m and 97kg, born at Waitabu in Fiji on 9 May 1998, and also recorded as Iosefo Masikau.

He picked the game up after starting at Holy Cross College and went on to represent Suva Grammar School at Under-18 level.

From 2017 to 2020 he played local sevens tournaments for Tabadamu. Fiji noticed him at the Bitter Marist 7s in 2020 and took him into the national sevens squad, and he scored a try across six matches at the Tokyo Olympics as they won the gold medal. The Oceania Sevens followed in 2021 and the World Cup in 2022.

In 2022 he trained with the North Queensland Cowboys in rugby league and played for the Townsville Blackhawks in the Queensland Cup.

His fifteen-a-side career began properly in 2023, at 24, when the Fijian Drua took him into their Super Rugby squad. He debuted against the Melbourne Rebels, scored three tries in a 47-46 win over Moana Pasifika, and finished with nine tries in fourteen matches, starting every one.

Fiji capped him that year against Samoa. He has four caps, two of them starts, and one try, and he was in the 33-man squad for the 2023 World Cup, appearing twice off the bench including the quarter-final against England.

Lyon signed him in 2025.

Nine tries in a debut Super Rugby season, from a converted sevens player who had never held a fifteens contract, is an unusual set of numbers. He is 28, with two Olympic medals and four caps, and this is his first season in Europe.