Chris Robshaw is exhausted. “My joints are starting to feel it already,” he says, stretching out his 6ft 2in, 110kg frame on the sofa in the sitting room of his Surrey home. The former England rugby captain has just finished training, not for a game but for his first performance on Strictly Come Dancing.
“We learnt the salsa this week,” he says proudly, “or was it the samba? I’m still learning which is which.” Robshaw was on the fence about taking part in the new series, which starts this weekend. It was his wife, the opera singer Camilla Kerslake, who finally convinced him to sign up. She asked when he last did something that pushed him out of his comfort zone, made him feel afraid. The answer, Robshaw says, is not since he stopped playing professional rugby three years ago.
“I work hard on things and I do this and that,” he shrugs, “but if I’m honest, I haven’t done something that really scares me since I retired.” Robshaw, 39, hung up his boots in 2022. It was the end of an illustrious 18-year career, 15 of which were spent with his Premiership-winning team, Harlequins. For almost a decade he played for England, earning 66 caps and serving as captain for three years, before the team’s devastating crash out of the World Cup in 2015. Dancing isn’t something he saw in his future, not least because he’s not very good at it, “apart from when I’ve had a couple of beers or tequilas”.
But learning a skill has brought some joy, he says, in what has otherwise been “a terribly difficult year for our family”. Last month it emerged that Robshaw had been the victim of a stalker.
Robshaw and his wife, Camilla Kerslake, at the 2022 Fashion Awards
ALAN D/ALAMY
Last summer, Robshaw briefly met a woman at two separate work events. Within six months of their initial interaction, she commenced a campaign of harassment, allegedly spreading false claims about him and encouraging others to do the same, including threats to tell lies about him and Camilla to social services — the couple have two sons, Wilding, four, and Hunter, one. When the threats turned violent, Robshaw called the police.
The investigation is still active and Robshaw is not able to discuss it in detail, but he describes it as a “tough situation” and an “ongoing headache”. The perpetrator, he says, “has multiple male and female victims spanning over many years who are unconnected and unknown to each other” and have “collectively had their lives ruined after enduring threats and harassment at the hands of this person”. According to reports, the woman is known to the authorities for similar offences against other victims, some of whom have alleged that she set fires and made bomb threats.
Kerslake, who had just given birth to Hunter when the ordeal began, addressed the situation on Instagram last month, saying the couple were “navigating a lot behind the scenes. We’re choosing to move forward … This won’t define us and instead, we’ll be focusing on our family and the exciting journey ahead.”
Robshaw says: “What should’ve been a time for celebrating our new baby was overshadowed as we were dealing with the horror of this. But Strictly has brought us some joy. It’s nice to hear the family laughing again, even if it is at my expense.”
The Strictly contestants, left to right Harry Aikines-Aryeetey, Vicky Pattison, Thomas Skinner, Ross King, George Clarke, Stefan Dennis, Dani Dyer, Alex Kingston, Balvinder Sopal, Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink, Karen Carney, Ellie Goldstein, Chris Robshaw, Lewis Cope and La Voix
RAY BURMISTON/BBC
Robshaw may not have been a Strictly fan but the competitive element of the programme clearly appeals. “When you retire from sport, you don’t miss going out in the rain or doing tackles,” he says. “You miss the buzz, that hair-on-the-back-of-your-neck feeling of running out at Twickenham … Maybe this can give me that.”
Robshaw, who grew up in Warlingham, Surrey, has played rugby since the age of seven. He now fills his time with “various part-time roles” — coaching rugby at a local school, acting as a silent partner in a chain of coffee shops in Hampshire, investing in fine wine and running a charity foundation with his wife — but rugby “is all I’ve ever known”, he says.
Having left the game, he’s “still very regimented” but has “struggled at various points” because, for a long time, sport served as an outlet for otherwise pent-up emotions, including grief. When he was five years old, his father, Alan, 40, had a fatal heart attack. Robshaw’s older brother, Al, turned the same age a few years ago, and next June so will he. It’s a milestone he’s been thinking about a lot. “When you’re a kid, you think 40 is old but then all of a sudden you’re that age with a young family,” he says. “I look around and I think how devastating it would be if something like that happened to one of us, what we’d leave behind … I think about it more now that I’ve got children. It definitely creeps up on me.”
Robshaw is a towering figure, warm and well mannered. As we speak, Rico, his elderly “slightly blind” affenpinscher toy dog snores between us on the sofa. “Everyone assumes I’d have a bigger dog,” he says when I point out how incongruous they look. “It’s like they expect me to have a rottweiler or something.”
LUCY YOUNG FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES
Having children has made him “a more emotional” man, who “weeps at rom-coms or even memes”. On the day we meet it is Wilding’s first day of school and Hunter’s first day at nursery (“a massive milestone”). At the height of his rugby career, Robshaw says, he was “stern, career-driven” and “carried a lot of baggage”.
That baggage was heaviest after the 2015 World Cup, which England hosted. The home team, captained by Robshaw, were eliminated before the knockout stages. While he was confident in his playing abilities, Robshaw has dyslexia, which made him worry about public speaking and hosting team meetings, especially when he had to write on a whiteboard, “because I didn’t want to spell things wrong. I do get self-conscious about stuff.”
He was blamed for England’s loss and “burnt pretty hard. Sport means a lot to people, it means a lot to me. It was the best part of my life. The players care more than anyone. When someone misses a penalty, they don’t sleep for days, they are distraught. But unfortunately in [games] we only see the robot. We don’t see the person or the emotion.”
Robshaw became the face of England’s World Cup disaster in 2015
DAVID DAVIES/PA
The years since have brought a newfound desire to teach young men, including his sons, the importance of allowing themselves to accept their emotions. He has had therapy, which he describes as a “daunting process”, and feels he has a much better “toolkit” to help navigate the highs and lows of Strictly. His main concern now, aside from learning the steps, is trying to loosen up enough to enjoy the experience. “As a sportsperson, you just say your pleases and thank-yous and toe the line, you tick a box and move on,” he says. Strictly, however, requires a bit of pizzazz. “It’s like I need to untrain myself from the last 20 years.”
Recently he was back at Twickenham to film his profile introduction for the show, “standing in front of the pitch tunnel doing a cheesy dance”, when a group of families touring the stadium came along. “They were all staring at me dancing in a rugby stadium. I was so uncomfortable,” he says, squirming. Friends have been gently mocking him (“If I annoy any of my mates, they start humming the theme tune”) and he is “slightly worried” by the number of people who keep telling him “you’re so brave”.
Ultimately, he is putting himself “so far out of my comfort zone” for the enjoyment of his sons. “I want to show my kids that their dad is still taking on challenges even if it’s in a completely different way to rugby,” he says. “I’m extremely nervous but I’m also really excited and, if nothing else, we’ll have a good laugh.”