Time has come for rugby to assess health risks of monster hits

One truth comes screaming out of this week’s debate about the use of strength-enhancing substances in rugby union: even the insiders are slightly bewildered by the speed at which the game has evolved and at the associated demands on its elite players. And that nobody is fully sure what the consequences are going to be.

The questions raised by the Irish sportswriter Paul Kimmage in his newspaper column and on the Seán O’Rourke radio show this week carry considerable clout given his dauntless quest to prove that Lance Armstrong, for a decade the white prince of professional cycling, was just another doper in a corrupt sport.

Rugby is enjoying a popular revolution and the packaging – including the slick television presentation, the modern stadia, the brilliantly marketed internationals, the old-school tie/upper-middle class tradition, the unwritten rule that every high-profile team should contain at least three or four vaguely handsome lads, the ripped physiques and the high velocity collisions – has turned the game into something like a religion for a broad cross-section of society.

The transformation of the game in two decades has been phenomenal. The provinces are – or at least were – winning. Ireland are winning. The idea that Ireland could win the World Cup next year is still extremely remote but not impossible.

The sport itself is going from strength to strength and nobody really wants to contemplate the suggestion that the best in the world might be juiced. It would be an unbearable betrayal of the very quality that has drawn so many people in – the extreme honesty and physical bravery of the players.

Illegal concoctions

Yet it would be wilfully innocent to assume, given the numbers playing the game and the easy access to strength supplements both legitimate and shady, that no Irish rugby player, at whatever level, has ever broken the rules when it comes to illegal concoctions.

And it is clear that adolescent boys, particularly those involved in sport, are conscious of strength and conditioning in a way they were not a generation ago. It is also obvious that extreme power has become a critical factor in rugby.

However, even allowing for the number of confirmed cases of drug-testing offences recently reported, there is a danger of making hysterical assumptions about the overall integrity of the sport – and about the players who have committed to it as a way of life. The salient point about Sam Chalmers, the Scottish under-20 international who is serving a two-year ban for straying into the wrong product use, is that he was tested and caught.

When the Irish coach Joe Schmidt coach said the other day he doesn't know of any problem here, he must be taken at his word. And when Alan Quinlan states in print that, as a professional rugby player for 15 years, he would have known about any transgressions, you have to assume he knows what he is talking about.

But equally, the questions raised by Laurent Bénézech, the former French prop who believes rugby may have a major problem, are worth airing and discussing.

Surely rugby needs to start seriously investigating the potential health consequences of 30 highly powerful and aggressive athletes clattering into one another at full speed for 80 minutes, week after week and season after season?

The most pressing question about professional rugby players is this: are they going to be all right when the cheering stops? Many rugby players have become staggeringly and, in some cases, grotesquely big, moulding and shaping their bodies to fit the positions in which they play, rather than maintaining their natural musculoskeletal frame.

Every time I watch a rugby game now, I wonder how and why they do it. The financial returns are not comparably favourable to other professional sports: only a handful of professionals can retire comfortably on what they earn.

And man, they all earn what they earn. The hours spent at the gym must be simultaneously gruelling and boring.

Interviewing Andrew Trimble a few years back, he mentioned with some dread a weights session that awaited him. We began chatting about the after-effects of a weights session and he said that on some mornings, he could hardly move.

And then there is the game itself. Anyone who watched Connacht playing a decade ago will recall the literal impact Bernard Jackman made when he arrived to play in Galway. The home team almost always worked on less possession and compensated by tackling like demons and Jackman was an exhibition in controlled fury, hurling himself into advancing props and locks who often seemed bigger and heavier than him.

Traumatised body

It was not surprising but still mildly shocking to discover the state in which the game left Jackman late in his career when he wrote his memoir – his knees shot, frequent concussions, ‘stingers’ causing temporary power loss in his arm, sometimes unable to walk down the stairs in the morning. A young man left with a traumatised body, in other words.

Thrilling as it was to watch Brian O’Driscoll play rugby, I for one was glad that he retired when he did because the sight of him sitting on the field dazed after another recklessly brave tackle had become an uncomfortable spectacle.

And in the recent autumn internationals, there was a series of collisions at which you could only wince. As the players become bigger, the hits inevitably become harder, but there is very little conversation or debate about the possible health repercussions of those hits for the players involved in the decades to come.

Surely rugby is reaching the point where parents are asking: do we want our child playing this game?

Rugby, both as a game and business, has moved at such a lightning pace that it has hardly paused for breath.

In the past few seasons, you see the South African team and even the England team trotting out onto the field and they are a frightening sight. That muscle mass and the collective size of teams and defensive organisation have helped to fundamentally change the way the game is played and you can’t help but feel that the wit is being squeezed out of it.

But of greater importance is the long-term welfare of today’s stars: the genuinely hard men who play hurt and dazed and play with no real value or fear for their physical wellbeing. Is rugby doing everything that possibly can be done to safeguard the wellbeing of those stars so they will be able to remember their best moments in their 40s, their 50s, their 60s?

If not, then rugby is unequivocally in the midst of a scandal.