GWENT provides three of the four members of the Wales team taking part in the Ladies World Pétanque Championships in France this week.

The event at Montaubon, near Toulouse, begins on Friday and will be televised for French speakers around the world.

Some 43 teams are taking part and the Welsh quartet is made up of Newport duo Tansy Mayfield and Gemma Foster and Julie Bailey, who lives near Abergavenny, alongside Gay Evans of Penarth.

Bailey’s husband Ian is also playing for Wales in the Men’s European Championships.

Bailey and Evans both play for Cardiff’s Monkstone Inn Pétanque Club while Foster plays for The Wheatsheaf in Llanhennock and Mayfield for Caerleon RFC Pétanque Club.

They are all experienced pétanque players. Mayfield, Foster and Bailey all played for Wales in last year’s Ladies European Championships in Ghent, Belgium.

Foster and Evans also played together in the last two Ladies World Championships in Turkey and in Thailand.

The quartet have been training at Pentwyn Leisure Centre before crossing the Channel to represent their country against the world’s best pétanque players in the sport’s home country.

Pétanque is a form of boules where the goal is, while standing inside a starting circle with both feet on the ground, to throw hollow metal balls as close as possible to a small wooden ball called a cochonnet or jack.

The current form of the game originated in 1907 in La Ciotat, in Provence, in southern France.