“If the UBB wins, it’s going to be partying for two days”

Laurent Marti still can’t believe it. “I would never have imagined such a craze. For a club that has not yet won a title, it’s quite incredible. »» When this 57-year-old Dordognais businessman took over the presidency of the Union Bordeaux-Bègles (UBB), in 2007, the team vegetated in D2, the second division of professional rugby, in front of barely 3,000 people. Almost twenty years later, his players competed in the European title of Champions Cup at the English of Northampton on Saturday May 24, at Millennium Stadium, in Cardiff, an enclosure of more than 70,000 places. Two eras, two worlds, witnesses of the new dimension taken by the UBB.

Since the start of the season, the club, second in the top 14, has been playing at home on a closed window. More than 32,000 spectators-including 17,000 subscribers-flock to Chaban-Delmas, a Centennial Art Deco stadium, with somewhat decaying whiteness, but with an intact chandelier. No team in Europe is doing better.

The Bordeaux go to the stadium with family, with friends. A new audience, more and more young people, which blends among the supporters of the first hour. We celebrate there before and after the match, at La Bodega, on the forecourt of the enclosure, or in the adjoining streets, between cars and on board the tram. The UBB wins, and the whole city is cheering. On match days, Bordeaux lives rugby, and “Chaban” is a beating heart.

So, would the Gironde city be the new European capital of rugby? A few years ago, the question would have lent to smile. Because, until recently, the “sleepy beautiful” pinched more for football. Especially in the Claude Bez era, the emblematic president of the Girondins (1978-1991). A golden decade, with three titles of champion of France won by the generation Tigana, Trésor and Giresse, which wrote the legend of Lescure, the former name of Chaban-Delmas. Bordeaux, in the 1980s, they were the Girondins.

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