Strip
Until 1912, the strip (uniform) of the French team was white with two rings, one red and one blue. After the first game won by France against Scotland in 1911, France's captain Marcel Communeau asked that the team adopt the coq gaulois (Gallic rooster), historical emblem of France, as its symbol. The Gallic rooster was probably chosen partly because it is considered as a proud and combative animal that can be sometimes aggressive, although it had been used previously as a symbol by French teams — a former soccer player, Jean Rigal, wore a uniform with this emblem as early as May 1910. The badge was initially white and red, but was altered to a multicoloured, embroidered image after 1945, and has been golden since 1970.
The symbol used by the French rugby team was a great success, and was later adopted by the French delegation at the Olympic Games of 1920 where the rooster was perched on five Olympic rings. The rooster has since become a well-known symbol of French teams. French players are sometimes called les coqs and some French supporters have been known to release roosters on the playing field before games.
The French team traditionally played in blue shirts, white shorts, and red socks, the colors of the national flag, and as such were nicknamed les tricolores. Due to the mostly blue strip the French team currently wears, the team is now often referred to as les Bleus (the Blues), like many other French sporting teams. When this strip clashes with that of their opponents, such as in games against Scotland and Italy, French players wear white. New strips were developed for the 2007 World Cup, one of which is a darker blue. In June 2011 they relaunched another kit which they wear blue shirt, blue shorts and blue socks for their home kit and they wear white shirt, white shorts and white socks for their away kit.
In 2011 the French Rugby Federation (FFR) announced that adidas would be their new partner for a period of six years, with them taking over production of the French national rugby shirt from 1 July 2012 to 30 June 2018. The latest French jersey was unveiled on July 9, 2012.
Read more about this topic: France National Rugby Union Team
Famous quotes containing the word strip:
“Here we’ll strip and cool our fire
In cream below, in milk-baths higher;
And when all wells are drawn dry,
I’ll drink a tear out of thine eye.”
—Richard Lovelace (1618–1658)
“The annals of this voracious beach! who could write them, unless it were a shipwrecked sailor? How many who have seen it have seen it only in the midst of danger and distress, the last strip of earth which their mortal eyes beheld. Think of the amount of suffering which a single strand had witnessed! The ancients would have represented it as a sea-monster with open jaws, more terrible than Scylla and Charybdis.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Perfect present has no existence in our consciousness. As I said years ago in Erewhon, it lives but upon the sufferance of past and future. We are like men standing on a narrow footbridge over a railway. We can watch the future hurrying like an express train towards us, and then hurrying into the past, but in the narrow strip of present we cannot see it. Strange that that which is the most essential to our consciousness should be exactly that of which we are least definitely conscious.”
—Samuel Butler (1835–1902)