Maxime Médard will hang up at the end of the season
Stade Toulousain international fullback Maxime Médard (35, 63 caps) will end his career at the end of the season. He will have won everything at club level but also played in a World Cup final with the Blues.
It is a page of Stade Toulousain but also of French rugby that will turn. At 35, Maxime Médard has decided to hang up his crampons at the end of the season. The international rear with 63 caps (author of 14 tries for the Blues) announced that he was ending his career this summer. First to its partners and then on social networks this Friday.
After spending his entire professional career in the Ville Rose, where he was born, Médard pondered for a long time what to do next. Do you stop again? The five-time French champion and three-time European Cup winner has finally decided to retire eighteen years after his first professional match with the red and black club. As Yoann Huget did last year. With Toulouse, he therefore won everything under the orders of Guy Novès then Ugo Mola and remains as one of the players who marked his generation.
Last selection in 2019
With the XV of France, he will also have known everything. With the culmination of a World Cup final, played as a holder, lost by a small point against the All Blacks (7-8) in New Zealand in 2011. Eight years later, he will play his last international match in the quarter-final lost to Wales, again by one point, in 2019 at the Japanese World Cup. If his adventure is over in selection, Médard can still dream of last trophies, both in the Top 14, where Toulouse occupies sixth place three days from the end, and in the European Cup, with a quarter-final against Munster next week in Dublin.
At Stade Toulousain, he will obviously leave a significant void, on the pitch and in the locker room. Its leaders had been preparing for this for some time. The club played by Didier Lacroix has also hit hard in recent weeks with the recruitment of Perpignan Melvyn Jaminet, Grenoble Ange Capuozzo or Rochelais Arthur Retière while extending Thomas Ramos for the next four years.