Summer finally seems to have arrived and Thursday 20th was my first chance to enjoy a day in the sun when I was invited to attend the Lloyds Rugby 7’s Tournament with “Chaucer” who are one of my sponsors. Chaucer were just one of forty teams competing (all subsidiaries of the Lloyd’s Group) at Richmond Rugby Club in West London.

It was a great day for 7’s and a sizeable crowd of city workers gathered to see the teams face off against one another in the Bowl, Plate or main Trophy. The lads from Chaucer failed to register a victory in their first two games despite some excellent play. Far from being disheartened, they went on to produce their best performance of the day in an incredibly close fought battle with “QBE”. Unfortunately Chaucer just came up short but it was a pleasure to spend the day with the team and next year’s Tournament is already firmly fixed in my diary.

After my enjoyable mid-week break, I was straight back into action with my league team “Kent Crusaders” in the GBWR Coloplast League. London always enters two teams into the league and our teammates (and main rivals) “Stoke Mandeville Storm” were the home side this weekend. Crusaders took maximum points from both “Cardiff Pirates” and the “Gaelic Warriors” but Storm were just too strong, beating us by five in our first encounter and squeezing past by just a single goal (44-45) in the second.

Everyone on the Crusaders squad shared equal court time across the Saturday and Sunday. Kylie Grimes (0.5) was the pick of the bunch, showing that she was un-phased by competing with International players in the league’s most passionate Derby. Also credit goes to Storm’s rookies, Chris Ryan (2.0) and Ricky Western (0.5) who both got in on the action too.

A quick stop at home and it was back off to Norfolk for a GB training Camp. The squad is spending three weeks preparing for the Canada Cup in Montreal, (June 18th-20th) which will be our last International Tournament before the World Championships. Our days are filled with training games, conditioning, line-up meetings, video analysis and plenty of other things to give us the best chance in Vancouver this September.

One unscheduled appointment came last Wednesday when UK Sport’s Anti-Doping Officers decided to pay us a visit. As elite athletes we’re eligible to be tested at any time and a minor disruption to training is a small price to pay for a clean Sport in my opinion. So I did what I had to do along with three other randomly selected squad members and let the Doping Control Staff be on their way.

It’s now the following Monday evening and I’m still at Camp after a pretty interesting weekend in London…

It’s not every day that you hijack a Ferry and sail it up the Thames (forcing Tower Bridge to open twice in the process) while playing a game of Wheelchair Rugby on the deck!

If you want to know more, you’ll just have to read my next post which will include pictures of what I think is the biggest publicity stunt this Sport has ever seen!