“He wanted to go to the ends of the earth“. And he had chosen La Réunion as a refuge, almost as a voluntary disappearance. Far from the rugby business, far from the fame of his brothers Marc and Thomas Lièvremont, far too from the ready-made career paths.

Vincent Lièvremont died a few days ago of generalised bone cancer, at the Saint-Pierre teaching hospital in the south of La Réunion. He was 56.

On the island, where he had lived for more than thirty years, many remember a profoundly free man, sometimes elusive, often barefoot, always faithful to a certain idea of life. A rugby man of the margins, in love with the game, with travel, with post-match evenings and with meeting people. In La Réunion, he had ended up becoming far more than “somebody’s brother“.

In La Réunion, a barefoot rugby man who arrived from the mainland in 1991

There are, then, men who pass through places without ever really stopping there. And then there are those who blend in so completely that they become a familiar silhouette. Vincent Lièvremont belonged to that second category. In La Réunion, where he had landed in the early 1990s almost by chance, he had become a discreet presence, but a well-known one in the small world of local rugby. An unusual figure, too. A man who looked like nobody else.

When Jean-Michel Piron, president of the La Réunion rugby league, recalls him today, it isn’t the pitches that come back to him first. It’s images that are almost cinematic. “He lived a bit wild, barefoot, with the beard, the long hair, hugging the trees…” As if Vincent Lièvremont had slowly detached himself from everything that made up the noise of the modern world. From the rugby spectacle too.

Back then, though, he arrived in La Réunion still with a player’s fire. In 1991, Armand Coupou, then president of the XV Dionysien, put him up at his home for several months. “He lived at my place for six months”, he says today.

The young man arrived with that vague urge to start something over somewhere else. “He wanted to go to the ends of the earth. He wanted to change his life“, Armand Coupou sums up.

La Réunion would end up being the place he put down roots.

From the XV Dionysien to sevens in Kenya

In La Réunion’s rugby of the 1990s, Vincent Lièvremont did not go unnoticed. A mobile back-rower, a player of graft and of instinct, he took part in the first great adventures of local sevens.

Jean-Michel Piron still remembers it: “He mainly played sevens, in the first tournaments we did in Kenya, at the Safari 7.“

Armand Coupou, for his part, talks of “enormous rugby qualities“. But what struck those who spent time with him most was his human relationship with rugby. The way he inhabited clubs. “He was someone who was part of the rugby family“, his former president says simply.

Because Vincent Lièvremont seemed to love the life around rugby more than rugby itself. The songs after matches. The long conversations. The post-match sessions that never end. “He loved rugby, and then life“, Armand Coupou adds softly.

Unlike his brothers, who became major figures in French rugby, he would never seek to fit into the structures. To professionalise his passion. To build a career.

He preferred the detours.

Pool attendant at the Créolia. An airline job at Air Madagascar alongside Nicolas Charlet. A regular traveller between La Réunion, Thailand and Cambodia. An existence made up of odd jobs, departures, returns and encounters.

Far from the rugby business of his Lièvremont brothers

He met a woman from La Réunion. Became a father. Then a grandfather. But even in that apparent stability, something in him remained deeply nomadic. Armand Coupou describes a man “always very comfortable barefoot“, living almost outside the traditional social codes of the island.

Towards the end of his life, Vincent Lièvremont had withdrawn to the heights above Manapany, in the wild south. An old creole house, a simple, almost self-effacing way of life. “He liked old houses, Armand Coupou says. He lived a bit on the fringes.“

A philosophy of life that held even through illness

There was nothing sad about that life on the fringes, though. Those who knew him talk of a man who was profoundly alive. Capable of disappearing for several weeks and then reappearing in a restaurant in Saint-Denis, singing with his mates. “He was someone who loved life“, Armand Coupou insists.

Even when he was ill, he stayed faithful to that instinctive philosophy. His generalised bone cancer, he tried for a long time to fight alone. With plants, herbs, natural remedies. “He didn’t get treatment. He liked to treat himself with herbs“, his former president says. As if official medicine still belonged to a world other than his own.

The Lièvremonts, a family united to the end

Deep down, Vincent Lièvremont, long hair and full beard, will have lived his whole life like that: slightly off to one side.

Without ever completely cutting himself off from his own, though. His brothers came to see him in La Réunion. His mother had remained present too. At his funeral, the whole family made the trip. Thomas Lièvremont was there. So was his sister. Marc had come to see him before he died, when he was still in palliative care.

But Vincent Lièvremont seemed to belong to a different time from that of contemporary French rugby. An era when you could still disappear a little. Live differently. Refuse the straight-line career.

In La Réunion, some still remember him turning up at the pitches with his long hair, his faraway look and his calm smile. Others recall the way he spoke softly, laughed easily, made do with little. Above all, many describe someone who never cheated. Not once.

In a game that has become ultra-professional, calibrated and monitored, Vincent Lièvremont embodied almost the opposite: a rugby of mates, of freedom, of travel and of making do.

A profoundly human rugby.

In Saint-Pierre, one last link with rugby

Jean-Michel Piron remembers, in fact, that only recently he had taken his grandson to the Saint-Pierre rugby school. Like one last link with a sport that had never completely left him.

There is something overwhelming in that image.

A slightly forgotten former player. A man worn down by illness. A barefoot grandfather watching children chase an oval ball across a pitch in La Réunion.

No doubt because his whole life was already contained in it. In quietly passing things on. In the margins. In that way of loving rugby without ever looking to draw any glory from it.

Vincent Lièvremont died far from the big stands and the cameras. But in La Réunion, many will keep the memory of a rare man. A man who had chosen the island to lose himself there a little, and who ended up finding another family.