‘The stigma will always be there, I’m prepared for the abuse’
AT SOME point, maybe as he prepares to pack down at a scrum, maybe at the bottom of a ruck, Ashley Johnson knows he will hear the words he dreads – drug cheat.
Where once it might have been his distinctive haircut that was a target for harmless jibes, the six-month ban the Wasp served earlier this year for a failed test offers much more painful material for the sledgers.
An anti-doping panel believed Johnson’s explanation that he had inadvertently taken his wife Chrizaan’s slimming pills instead of his own club-approved supplements – a mix-up for an 18st 10lb forward that would be comic if the consequences were not so serious. It concluded he was innocent of trying to enhance his performance, but a drug-test failure sticks.
His nine-year-old son Jordan was bullied over it at school and Johnson, sitting in the team meeting room at their Broadstreet training ground, accepts the verbal abuse will inevitably be headed his way too.
“I have prepared myself because I know it is coming. There will always be people who will say something and maybe when I least expect it on the pitch,” said Johnson.
“But if you survive the banter here, you’re prepared for anything. Nothing is swept under the carpet at Wasps.
Every time I take a supplement, one of the boys will say,
‘Hey, be careful what you’re doing’.”
Being careless could have cost the 32-year-old South African his career. Johnson traces the fateful moment back to a typically chaotic breakfast time at home with his wife and three children. Instead of taking the capsules from the Nutrilean bottle which were laid out on the kitchen work surface, he took those next to them which had come from a jar of ‘The Secret’, a fat burner his wife had bought over the internet. Contained within them was the banned diuretic hydrochlorothiazide. When Johnson was urine-tested at the club’s training ground on February 7, he failed.
“Life happens and sometimes you take things for granted and relax a bit but you have to be more intelligent than that,” he said.
“I’ve reflected on a lot of things I could have done differently. I didn’t take anything on purpose but I’ve made some lifestyle changes in terms of what I do at home.
“Accidents happen and I am a great example of that but I have learnt from it and I think the players around me have learnt about the dangers of not being diligent about what you put in your body.”
A weight-loss product is performance-detracting rather than enhancing to a professional rugby player, but hydrochlorothiazide can also act as a masking agent for something more sinister.
Johnson is grateful to Wasps, in particular owner Derek Richardson and director of rugby Dai Young, below left, for standing by him during the disciplinary process and the suspension.
He was fortunate in that it was backdated to the date of the failed test so he did not miss any of this season, but the separation of having to train apart from the team hurt.
“Everyone at Wasps was so supportive – Derek, Dai and the friends I’ve made here over the
Without all my friends and family, I don’t think I’d have got through it
years,” said Johnson. “Without them and my family, I don’t think I would have got through it.
“It does give you a bit of perspective. It makes me think now, even when we lose, there’s always worse things that can happen. You could always be out of a job for six months. Always be grateful for what you have.
“The stigma will always be there but being back on the field and contributing again to the Wasps family has helped me to move on.”
After missing last weekend’s game against Saracens with a knee injury, Johnson is set to be involved again in Europe on Saturday against Toulouse.
On the wider issue of drugs in rugby, the fight to hold the line continues. Rugby is a power-based sport and the advantages of putting on muscle are obvious. The temptation to cut corners may be there for some players but Johnson’s sense is that the deterrents are keeping the sport clean.
“It’s difficult to comment but, talking from experience, with the amount of times we get tested there is no hiding place. I’m tested five or six times a year,” he said. “You’re playing with your career if you do it. You can lose it just like that.”