France
As of 2008, Australian rules football was played in France by four clubs in Strasbourg, Paris, Montpellier and Bordeaux, with the Paris Cockerels winning the inaugural national club championship tournament that year.
The national league commenced on 28 March 2009 with those four clubs, although new sides are also under formation in Perpignan, Toulouse and Aix en Provence. The newly-formed Perpignan Tigers will compete in the Catalan league in 2009.
The French national team has competed at the EU Cup, and made their Australian Football International Cup debut in 2011.
Read more about this topic: Australian Rules Football In Europe
Famous quotes containing the word france:
“The bugle-call to arms again sounded in my war-trained ear, the bayonets gleamed, the sabres clashed, and the Prussian helmets and the eagles of France stood face to face on the borders of the Rhine.... I remembered our own armies, my own war-stricken country and its dead, its widows and orphans, and it nerved me to action for which the physical strength had long ceased to exist, and on the borrowed force of love and memory, I strove with might and main.”
—Clara Barton (1821–1912)
“I shall not bring an automobile with me. These inventions infest France almost as much as Bloomer cycling costumes, but they make a horrid racket, and are particularly objectionable. So are the Bloomers. Nothing more abominable has ever been invented. Perhaps the automobile tricycles may succeed better, but I abjure all these works of the devil.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)
“The anarchy, assassination, and sacrilege by which the Kingdom of France has been disgraced, desolated, and polluted for some years past cannot but have excited the strongest emotions of horror in every virtuous Briton. But within these days our hearts have been pierced by the recital of proceedings in that country more brutal than any recorded in the annals of the world.”
—James Boswell (1740–1795)