Lester Etien

He did not pick up a rugby ball until he was fourteen. Nine years later he was starting in the Top 14.

Lester Etien had been playing football since he was six and did not start rugby until the 2009-10 season, at Maisons-Alfort, aged fourteen. Nine years after that he signed for a Top 14 club, and at twenty-nine France capped him.

Wing at Stade Français, 1.80m and 93kg, and 31 years old.

Créteil is where he grew up, in a family from Guadeloupe. Three seasons of club rugby were enough to get him to Massy, where he reached the first team at the end of 2014-15 alongside Sekou Macalou and Judicaël Cancoriet.

Those two left in 2015 and he did not. Massy went down to the third division and he stayed for four seasons in all, established himself there, and became one of the side’s key men when they came back up to Pro D2. Fifty professional matches and fifty points later, the bigger clubs were circling.

Paris took him in 2018. The start was hard and he was a regular starter by mid-season. When the championship resumed after Covid he came back at six tries in ten matches, in a side Gonzalo Quesada had just taken over and pushed back towards the top of the table.

Fabien Galthié’s first squad, for the 2020 Six Nations, included him. He was injured and left it after the opening win over England without having played. It took another four years and a summer squad built without the senior players before he got on the field, in the first match in Argentina in July 2024.

Macalou is his team-mate again now, two Massy forwards-and-backs from the same year in the same Paris side a decade on.