World Rugby v. Axelle Berthoumieu

During France's Rugby World Cup 2025 quarter-final win over Ireland at Sandy Park on 14 September, French flanker Axelle Berthoumieu was penalised for holding on at a breakdown. While on the ground, she took hold of Ireland's Aoife Wafer by the wrist, held her arm in place, and bit her lower forearm. The referee did not see the incident live but noted it was under review; Wafer immediately complained and was later found to have a superficial bite mark confirmed by the Ireland team doctor. Berthoumieu did not dispute any of this: she admitted the bite and admitted it merited a red card, explaining she had felt "trapped" and "claustrophobic" with Wafer's arm across her face and had bitten her in an attempt to free herself, without intending injury.

An initial Foul Play Review Committee (FPRC) hearing on 15 September proposed a 12-match suspension, giving Berthoumieu only partial mitigation because video appeared to show her nudging Wafer's arm twice before biting — which the FPRC treated as showing two opportunities to stop that she did not take. Berthoumieu appealed the length of the ban to a full Disciplinary Committee, chaired by Christopher Quinlan KC with Juan Pablo Spirandelli and Bogdan Zebega, which heard the case on 16 September as a hearing de novo — meaning the Committee was not reviewing the FPRC's decision for error, but reconsidering the appropriate sanction entirely afresh.

The Committee set a mid-range entry point of 18 weeks, higher than the low-end starting point Berthoumieu had argued for, citing the intentional nature of the bite, the significant force used, the injury it caused, and the disproportion between the bite and Wafer's legitimate attempt to win the ball. It then departed from the FPRC on mitigation specifically: the Committee held that the two-nudges evidence the FPRC had relied on to withhold full mitigation was relevant only to how serious the conduct was — the entry point — and had no bearing on the separate question of mitigation once the entry point was set. Given Berthoumieu's admission, clean disciplinary record, and remorse the Committee accepted as genuine, it awarded full 50% mitigation, discounting nine weeks rather than the FPRC's six and arriving at a final nine-match suspension.

The nine matches ran from the ban's immediate effect through 15 December 2025, covering France's two remaining World Cup fixtures — the semi-final against England and the bronze or final match — plus seven named domestic fixtures for her club, Bordeaux. The case is instructive less for the length of the ban than for the reasoning behind the increase in mitigation: the same underlying fact (the two nudges) can bear on an entry point and be legally irrelevant to mitigation, a distinction the FPRC did not draw and the Disciplinary Committee explicitly corrected on appeal.