Swan Cormenier

He took a plumbing qualification, then a part-time desk job at a Navy recruitment office so he could keep playing. Now he starts in the Top 14.

Before he was a professional, Swan Cormenier trained as a plumber and heating engineer, then took a part-time secretarial job at a French Navy recruitment centre. The arrangement was that he played for the Navy team. He won two French military championships doing it.

He is a loosehead prop at Bayonne, 1.75m and 118kg — short and very heavy, which is the classic build for the position.

He is from Cognac, where his father Romuald worked for the town council and propped for the local club. Swan followed him into it, stayed until 2011, then joined Brive and won two cadet championships.

Albi gave him his first senior rugby in 2017-18, in Fédérale 1, on Arnaud Méla’s recommendation. Thirty-three matches over two seasons, eighteen of them starts. Yannick Bru signed him for Bayonne in February 2019 on one year plus an option.

He made his Top 14 debut in the opening round of 2019-20, when Bayonne won away at Racing 92, and started against Stade Français two weeks later. Eight matches that season, then fifteen the next as the club went down.

Pro D2 gave him a run. He started the 2022 final as Bayonne won it and came straight back up, and from 2022-23 he was the first-choice loosehead, playing 23 matches as the club qualified for the Champions Cup for the first time.

Injuries then interrupted him badly: an elbow in November 2023, a wrist eight minutes into his comeback in December, and a collarbone sprain in pre-season 2025 that cost him the start of the season. He came back in round four and started twenty of his twenty-four matches, scoring his first tries for the club, one of them in a 31-18 win over Clermont.

He came on in the historic draw at Munster. Bayonne lost that season’s semi-final to Toulouse.