Humiliating rugby club initiation rites to be rooted out

OBSCENE and degrading initiation ceremonies at university rugby clubs have plunged the sport into crisis as students shun the game for fear of being humiliated, it emerged yesterday.

Rubbing chilli powder into private parts, fishing dead rats out of buckets of cider with players’ teeth and having vomit hurled at new team recruits are some of the antics said to be taking place at university clubs.

The Rugby Football Union (RFU) is urging students to report any humiliating rites of passage in a bid to stamp out such ‘laddish’ behaviour.

Initiation ceremonies are banned but it is feared they are continuing under the guise of “welcome drinks”.

Steve Grainger, the RFU’S rugby development director, said they were investigating how widespread the “alarming and unacceptable” behaviour is at English universities.

“Anything that makes people uncomfortable and drives them away from our sport is something we want to know about,” he said.

Phil Attwell, chairman of the Students RFU, said: “It isn’t just rugby, every year there will be two or three sports where the behaviour isn’t what we would want it to be.”

Twickenham bosses are to invest £443million in a bid to surpass football as England’s most dominant sport.

Sport England figures for 2016 show there are 199,000 rugby union players compared with 1.84 million footballers.