Lekso Kaulashvili

Lekso Kaulashvili was fifteen when his village on the banks of the Liakhvi was destroyed in the war between Georgia and Russia in August 2008. The family lost everything and moved to Tbilisi. Rugby came to him about a year after that.

Prop at Pau, 1.85m and 132kg, and 34 years old.

Lock was where he began, alongside his younger brother Saba, before a move to prop. Through the former Georgia hooker Gregori Labadze he reached French clubs, and La Rochelle took him into their academy in 2013, which also gave him the domestic-training status that makes a foreign player cheaper to squad.

He debuted within months and stayed five seasons, eighty matches, through promotion to the top flight and a disc operation in 2016 that cost him three months.

The neck is the rest of the story. A first cervical operation in September 2017 kept him out ten weeks. Bordeaux-Bègles signed him the following summer and he played seven league matches before injuring the same area against Perpignan in October 2018. He was operated on again a month later and afterwards could not feel his arms or his legs.

The return protocol required a cervical traction test. He passed it comfortably, was cleared to play, and did so knowing a residual risk had been acknowledged. He started again in September 2019, more than a year after his last start, and Christophe Urios settled him at loosehead.

Georgia capped him at 28, at Murrayfield in October 2020, and he won four in that autumn. He passed a hundred matches for Bordeaux in 2023 and moved to the Béarn after that, still propping in the Top 14 at 34.