Thomas Moukoro

Racing 92 extended Thomas Moukoro to 2025 in June 2022. He was still in the academy side and had never played a senior match.

Born in Paris on 1 January 2002 and of Cameroonian descent, he is a loosehead prop at Lyon, 1.85m and 121kg.

He did not start playing until 2016, at fourteen. For a front-rower that is very late. Most of the looseheads he packs against have been scrummaging since primary school, and the technique takes longer to learn than anything else on the field.

Racing trained him and he went through the pôle espoirs at the Lycée Lakanal in the Île-de-France.

France Under-18s took him to the International Series in South Africa in 2019, and the federation named him in the Pôle France group for 2020-21. He played two matches of the 2021 junior Six Nations and four of the 2022 tournament, then four more at the Summer Series in Italy, where he was sent off for a dangerous tackle in the fifth-place play-off and banned for three matches.

His senior debut came on 4 February 2023, off the bench away at Pau, and he scored his first try a month later at home to Toulouse. His first start followed on 1 April, in a Challenge Cup last-16 tie against the Lions. He scored twice. Racing lost.

Short of rugby by the following January, he was loaned to Vannes in Pro D2. Lyon announced his signing in January 2025, for the season now under way.

Two tries in a losing knockout match is a strange line on a prop’s record, and it is most of what is known about him at senior level. He is 24, in his first season at a new club, and the scrum will decide the rest.