Cameron Hill

A tough weekend for Irish rugby on what could have been a glorious weekend.

I suppose it felt like Montpellier were always going to pull away from Ulster in the Challenge Cup final on Friday night.

And yeah, there's a reason Bordeaux were so hotly tipped to go back to back in the Champions Cup this year.

Leinster, while they did score first...

It seemed like Bordeaux scored far easier when they got their first try.

And when you've got the likes of Louis Bialbiare, Maxime Lucu, Mathieu Jalibert, Damien Pennault, to name but a few in your team, it's only going to go one way, you feel.

And there were mistakes and it felt like it was the story of Leinster's season where there were knock-ons needlessly at the back of the ruck.

Just sloppy individual errors because they could have kept Bordeaux much closer.

But it really did feel like, despite the scoreline, Bordeaux didn't get out of third gear really.

It felt like they still had a little bit more to give.

Yeah.

And it's emblematic, I suppose, of the French stranglehold that they have on European rugby right now.

I think it's the last six champions in the Champions Cup are French.

And you just feel like it's going to be very hard for anyone outside of the top 14 to break that hoodoo.

No, well, I was on the bus, if that counts.

But yeah, so on your Todd, I only discovered this last week, comes from James Foreman Sloan, who was a very successful jockey at the turn of the 20th century, known as Toad by his father, a rather cruel nickname because he was very short.

He changed it to Todd, which I think was a good call, and

At age 12, his disproportionately short legs helped him become a jockey, a very successful jockey in fact.

He dominated the racing scene on the east coast of the US in the late 1890s.

He won 46% of his races that he entered in 1898 and then he moves to the UK where he's selected to ride for the King, then Prince of Wales, then King Edward VII.