Sailing around the Med for a year is next for me

IN 18 months’ time, when my final contract with Castres expires, I will literally be sailing off into the ocean with my partner, leaving my rugby career behind.

- TYLER ARDRON

We’re in the process of buying a catamaran and the plan is to do a year sailing the Med before heading back home to Canada.

I was talking to a friend the other day about how fortunate I am to be in this position. What rugby has given me, and the life I can have, is not something I ever envisaged when I was growing up in a little farming village called Warsaw in Canada. It was only when we moved to a small town called Lakefield, which had a population of 1,800, that I first came across rugby. There weren’t enough students there to support an American Football programme so one of our teachers, Dave Donald, who’d played rugby while on exchange in Ireland, introduced rugby into the curriculum.

I didn’t love rugby more than ice hockey by any means but I found out I was pretty good at it. I played a few games for Peterborough Pagans before I went off to McMaster University in Ontario, and earned a few extra dollars while I was playing for Brentford Harlequins. But other than that, I had very little experience of senior men’s club rugby when I won the first of my 38 caps against USA in 2012. I was a second-year student at the time.

If you look at the team when I made my debut a lot of those guys were playing professional rugby in Europe, so I had to get up to speed pretty quick. It wasn’t until I played my first tour and built up my game time that I started to think I belonged there. The one game I’ll never forget is the Scotland game in Toronto. We lost 17-19. I was captain and we had the ball centre-field on the 22, they gave away a penalty so we were playing under advantage, and Jebb Sinclair had the ball tucked under his arms going into contact. Their 10 had his head on the wrong side and was knocked out cold in the tackle and for some reason, the ref gave him for a red card. We felt we had been robbed. Since that game, I don’t think we’ve ever had a chance to knock off a top tier team.