One of those who turn pundit, coach or director? Not at all. He never really left the pitch behind, but Rémy Martin chose a different dressing room. A different smell, too. Warm bread at first light.
In Apt, in the Vaucluse, the former international back-rower now opens the doors of his bakery before the town wakes up. Boots have given way to bakehouses, dressing rooms to preparation labs, pre-match talks to team meetings. The setting has changed. The principles have not.
At almost 47, he runs a staff of about fifteen with the same obsession he had on Top 14 pitches. Make the collective win.
“I have three bakers, six people in preparation, six sales assistants… and me in the middle. I try to oversee all that the way I was taught for fifteen years in a rugby team. I want people to help each other, a real group.“
The manager’s suit
“Group” is indeed the right word. Not company. Not staff. Group. As if rugby were still quietly breathing through every one of his choices.
Yet nothing really marked Rémy Martin out for an apron. Far from it.
When he hung up his boots in 2015, his first plan was something else entirely. He looked at going back to study to become a physiotherapist. He even sat a qualification to get into a school. Then life, as it often does, reshuffled the pack. A divorce turned the plans upside down. He had to rebuild differently.
He joined Carmila, the property arm of Carrefour. Over nine years he climbed the ladder to become regional director for the whole of southern France. A manager’s suit he wore seriously, without ever letting go of an idea slowly growing in a corner of his mind.
Open a business. Not just any business.
Simplicity and closeness
Through his meetings with the brands based in shopping centres, one franchise caught his eye. Boulangerie Ange. It would take him three more years to get the project off the ground, find a site, wait, build his case.
Nothing is urgent when you know where you are going. “What I liked was the simplicity, the closeness, the fact that everyone is on first-name terms. It reminded me of my fifteen years in rugby. The values matched mine completely.”
The parallel is right there in front of him. “In a dressing room as in a bakehouse, everyone depends on everyone else. Mistakes are paid for collectively. So are the successes.“
Pragmatism
Since it opened last May, the days start well before dawn. “The competition is there. You have to win customers over, get the place known, never let your attention drop.“
He goes on: “You have to be precise, pragmatic and on time for every appointment.” A very rugby line, isn’t it? Rugby, though, has drifted away. For lack of time.
Before opening his bakery, Rémy Martin had gone back to the pitch as coach of UMS. Two seasons, promotion from Fédérale 3 to Fédérale 2, then a fresh start.
“Rugby has changed a lot”
These days he watches matches more than he prepares them. And he likes what he sees.
“Rugby has changed a lot. Players are better protected, and that is a good thing. The collisions are far more violent than before. I loved watching the Top 14 final.”
He even smiles thinking back to the old hands who already told him rugby was no longer the game of their day. Now it is his turn to look at the new generations with a hint of nostalgia mixed with admiration. And that new generation runs through his own house too.
Brothers
Roméo, his eldest son, plays in Toulouse. He has just taken part in the U20 World Championship in Georgia and scored a try there against Fiji. Jules, soon to turn eighteen, will also join the Rouge et Noir after leaving Bayonne. Behind them, little César, seven, is already running everywhere with a ball in Cassis. Quite a set of brothers. Three boys. Three stories being written at their own pace.
The former Stade Français player, for years an opponent of Stade Toulousain in the championship’s great era, now looks at the Rouge et Noir differently. “I was backing Toulouse this weekend,” he said after the Top 14 final, won by Ugo Mola’s side. “My son is happy there. Above all I am proud of them.“
He insists on one point: “Their choice is not mine.”
“Today I am broken”
Because the former international knows too well what a career costs to push anyone down that road. “Of course I would have preferred them to do something else. Today I am broken. Every player is. If anyone tells you otherwise, it is not possible.”
The verdict is blunt. Without bitterness. Because the qualifier comes straight away. “But living off your passion… what is better than that?”
That is the whole thing. Rémy Martin now talks about rugby the way you talk about an old travelling companion you spent long years on the road with. With affection, sometimes with pain, never with regret.
A nose for wine
He now dreams of opening more bakeries, is developing a small wine estate producing 5,000 bottles a year near Nîmes, and watches his children carry on a story he knows by heart.
He no longer needs to step onto the pitch. He has simply “changed scrums“. And deep down, he is doing exactly the same job. The one that consists of bringing people together around a shared project.
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