TOUR DE FORCE
George North spent the summer cycling with Geraint Thomas...now for Wales, the World Cup and his wedding!
NOT TOO many sportsmen prepare for the biggest year of their life with a bumper holiday and bike rides with their mates.
For George North, of course, it was not just any old mate but Tour de France winner Geraint Thomas, whom he met through his fiancee Becky James, the Olympic track cyclist.
With a World Cup and a wedding to come next year and after eight seemingly endless seasons of record-breaking, emotional highs and more recent lows, it was time for North to rediscover a life outside rugby in the Welsh valleys. ‘It was funny,’ North told
Sportsmail. ‘We stopped at a place for a coffee and a few beers and I said: ‘‘Imagine how weird this looks! Geraint Thomas, who has just won the Tour de France, next to me looking like a burst sausage in lycra!”.
‘I was in full kit and his father was too — I thought: “This would be a hell of an image!” ’
Soon, Thomas was winding him up — gleefully telling a Welsh rugby podcast just how slow North was in the saddle.
‘He’s been talking s***!’ laughed North. ‘I’m never riding with him now. He’s taking the mickey! He’s not my friend any more — deleted his number, off the Christmas card list!
‘I offered Geraint a rematch at rugby. A one-on-one. Funnily enough, he’s not been keen! He said he was racing at 68kg (10st 9lb). I was 12 the last time I was that weight!’
North loves riding his bike, explaining: ‘When I put on my helmet, my phone is on silent. No one screaming, telling you you’re rubbish or what you should do differently.’
There were plenty of touchline observers and keyboard warriors doing just that in his latter years at Northampton Saints.
North — nicknamed the ‘man-child’ but now a 6ft 5in and 17st 2lb man-mountain — felt sporting adversity for the first time.
A career trajectory soaring endlessly skyward, suddenly flatlined. An injury here, a concussion saga there, 13 league tries in his last three seasons, a club in decline, the ball harder to find and pressure — that old foe — weighing heavily on his huge shoulders.
North, an ambassador for Land Rover, said: ‘Naturally, you’ll get times where, through no fault of your own, the squad isn’t going the way or playing the way you want to get the best out of you. Or maybe the team has injuries galore, so you can’t do anything. These are the times when you feel it the most because you feel you need to be that guy to deliver.
‘Sometimes you can’t. People scream when I get the ball, even if I have just a metre to work with. “Oh he’s going to score”. I’m like: “Come on!”. I wish I could, but I can’t.
‘That’s something that will always be with me — people’s expectation and pressure for me to perform. It’s hard to carry, but that challenge excites me and drives me on.’
North watched the ‘wildfire’ of his acrimonious exit from Franklin’s Gardens ‘burn’ around him. He was criticised and punished for missing a league match but then playing for Wales.
He insisted there was no animosity, that he enjoyed his time and finished on good terms — but needed to leave. ‘The Premiership is a huge beast,’ he said.
‘It was awesome, but you have to take a step back sometimes. I thought: “Who am I? What am I doing? Where am I going?”
‘I needed to mix things up. It meant coming back to Wales.
‘The bigger picture was the main factor. Rugby-life mix, rotation, times when I could have breaks, go away, take a step back, do a conditioning block to top up if I needed it — having that freedom to benefit myself and the club.
‘It was my first ever summer, so to speak. Becky and I went to Ibiza at the last minute. We went right to the north of the island to stay in the middle of nowhere, which was lovely.
‘I completely chilled mentally and physically for the first time in … well, ever really. It gave me energy for this season.’
Settled now in Cardiff in what is his soon-to-be marital home, he still has a few boxes to sort through after moving belongings from Becky’s house in Manchester and his own in Northampton. North is also back in the goldfish bowl. With Wales’ autumn Tests against Scotland, Australia, Tonga and South Africa, pressure grows again.
In 2019, North will be 27, marry Becky and then two weeks later train for his third World Cup — using the hurt of 2011 as fuel.
‘We came so close to beating France in that semi-final,’ he recalls, with Wales losing just 9-8 despite having captain Sam Warburton sent off.
‘It aches, it hurts — and it should. You work your fingers to the bone, run like you have never run before and lose like that. We will use that for what is to come.’
North has achieved so much more than most could dream of but does not yet feel fulfilled.
He has won 76 Wales caps and has set himself a target. ‘I’ve played a long time, but I hope there’s more to give,’ he said. ‘I still feel 18, still take the Michael and still jump out to scare people, wind people up.
‘I’ll keep playing until I can’t. If it gets to a point where I sit back and think I’ve nothing else to do then maybe I will call it a day.
‘A hundred caps is one goal I’ve set myself. If you can get into the 100-cap club, you’re in a different level. It is elite.
‘I could then retire knowing I was a half-decent player. When I’m sitting in the corner of a pub with my curry-stained tie on, I can always pull out that line!
‘To play once is huge. To do it 100 times would be the best tick I’ve ever ticked in my whole ticking life!’
Revitalised, re-energised, North is out to prove in these times of lengthened seasons, a rest is as good as a change.
ALLAN DELL now realises that his body is not made of elastic bands and magic. His bones and muscles are not invincible in the way he thought they once were and there have been times when, in his own words, he has felt like a ‘wounded wildebeest’.
Dell admits now that, through the naivety of youth, there was a time when he felt unbreakable, that his body was somehow immune to the harsh physical realities of the sport he plays.
But a career spent in the front row does not cater for such thoughts of utopia. It is rather more uncompromising, both on body and mind.
It is with a sharpened sense of appreciation that Dell can now reflect on his personal injury nightmare. The past 12 months have been without question the toughest of his career.
The Edinburgh prop is now a fixture in the Scotland squad once again, though he admits he was unsure whether his comeback would ever allow him to reach this juncture.
‘You take it for granted that you can get out of bed and go for a sprint or a warm-up,’ says Dell, a 26-year-old South African native who qualifies for Scotland through his Paisley-born grandmother.
‘You appreciate it a lot more. Getting back into the squad gives you confidence to carry on doing what you’re doing. Getting an opportunity to be selected is a massive privilege.’
In the summer of 2017, Dell was drafted into the British and Irish Lions squad that was on tour in New Zealand.
It did not matter that he was one of the so-called ‘Geography Six’, a group that Warren Gatland parachuted in mid-tour to play in the midweek team.
Dell was still a Lion. He still wore the jersey, coming on as a replacement in the final warm-up game against the Chiefs, and, quite rightly, he still looks back on it with immense pride.
Returning home from New Zealand, though, it was almost as soon as he got off the plane that things started to go wrong.
In the following weeks and months, a succession of chronic injury problems — with his back, his groin and an assortment of other little niggles — planted seeds of doubt in his mind.
‘Frustration is definitely one of the words you’d use,’ he says now. ‘I thought about quitting rugby at one stage, especially with the back and groin at the same time.
‘I was in a stage where I was thinking: “Am I going to carry on with rugby?”. It was just with the way my body was feeling and the things I couldn’t do that I’d taken for granted.
‘Just getting out of bed and putting my socks on was a struggle. When you have pain like that, you start thinking about your future. It’s not something you want to live with. I’m just grateful that I’m out of that.’
As has been the case with several other Scotland props over the past couple of years, Dell’s body has limited his involvement with the national side.
Upon his arrival home from New Zealand, doctors found that he had not one but two bulging discs in his back, one of which was pressing on a nerve.
He tried to persevere as best he could without going under the knife for surgery, only to suffer a completely different injury.
‘In training, I went for a sprint and felt a sharp pain in my groin,’ he explains. ‘It was probably tied in with the way the body works, with the back, glutes and hamstring.
‘So I had a groin operation and back operation in the space of ten days. I would have tried to push on like a wounded wildebeest, but the groin tear allowed us to fix the back, too.’
At such a low ebb mentally, then, what did Dell use as his motivation to claw his way back to full fitness and make sure his career did not end prematurely?
‘Family, support and just remembering why you play the game — and also that I’d have to go back and work on the farm, get up at 5am and home at 8pm covered in dust and cow excrement… you don’t really want that, eh?’ he laughs.
‘You’re not going to give your career up easily. You have a soft moment when your brain starts playing tricks on you, but you get over it. I got the help I needed.
‘I have definitely changed the way I play a lot. I’m not as free around the park. I’m trying to find a balance between that old style and doing my job, set-piece work and making tackles.’
Dell returned towards the end of last season and went on Scotland’s summer tour, playing in all three Tests against Canada, America and Argentina, to take his tally of caps to 13.
The loose-head could form an all-Edinburgh front row in Saturday’s opening match of the autumn internationals against Wales in Cardiff, along with club-mates WP Nel and Stuart McInally.
‘When you wear the jersey, these are the things you’ll remember when you retire, especially representing your country against big nations,’ says the man who made his debut against Australia in the autumn of 2016.
‘Those are the memories you will always remember and you’ll forget about the hardships. Getting a chance to win a spot is what drives you.’
Of the visit to the Principality Stadium, Dell adds: ‘I’ve never played there before, but I’ve watched a few games and the singing always sounds great.
‘Going to a hostile environment pumps you up. You hear the crowd noise, but you don’t think about who it’s for. I don’t think it’s too intimidating.’
Dell strikes you as an all-round decent fella, almost too nice to be a prop.
He adds: ‘Some guys get quite aggressive. But, if I did that, I’d probably do something stupid and get a yellow card or red card.
‘I like to think clearly. The red-mist, headbutt-a-locker style isn’t really the way I go about things. I try to stay as calm as I can.’