The game must face up to its possible drugs problem
YOU might have missed it but in the last couple of months a former doper has slipped into the country and breathed life back into Gloucester in his capcity as coach while another former drug cheat is poised to make his competitive debut for Munster.
Johan Ackermann – banned for two years in 1997 for using nandralone – has been cleverly nudging Gloucester in the right direction and impressing the locals while over at Munster the 25-year-old Gerbrandt Grobler,
below, is fit and ready to go after injuring his ankle in pre-season. Gerbrandt received a two-year ban in 2015 after testing positive for the anabolic steroid drostanolone.
Munster’s Conor Murray strongly defended his colleague earlier this week: “He completely accepts what he did, it was wrong, but does that mean he shouldn’t play rugby again? I think that is crazy. I think it is a case-bycase basis. It was the wrong decision, he was young and foolish. He paid the price for it. Everyone deserves a second chance, he has learned from his mistakes.”
Interesting. Is the Rugby ‘family’ being mature in the way it doesn’t make a big issue of those who have ‘done the crime but served the time’ or should we be raging that rugby isn’t more moralistic and censorious on this subject?
It goes without saying that if Team Sky had hired an ex-doper as their new directeur sportif back in September or recruited a recently convicted doper as one of their most promising riders it would be front and back page news for months.
But rugby remains largely mute on the subject, steadfast in its conviction that the game doesn’t have a significant doping problem. Hopefully that is the case but the sport requires strength, speed and endurance which fits the doping profile and the glut of injuries also provides further temptation. The truth is we don’t really know and the testing programme is nowhere near comprehensive enough. Top cyclists get tested 70-80 times a year. How often does a top rugby player? Two or three times perhaps but occasionally never. Rugby needs to put itself above suspicion.
Rugby travels to the beat of a different drum when it comes to the drugs issue. Former Italy lock Carlo De Fava served a two-year ban early in his career for using stanozolol but is regularly trotted out by all sorts of media as their Italy expert come the Six Nations.
Back in 2010 both Bjorn Basson and Chiliboy Ralepelle were sent home from the Boks tour of Britain when they tested positive for the banned substance Methylhexanamine but but were then cleared on the grounds that it must have been in a supplement the team had been taking.
In 2014, by the way, Ralepelle tested positive again, this time for drostanolone while playing with Toulouse for which he served a two-year ban. By 2016 he was back playing for the Sharks and last autumn reappeared for the Boks against Italy. No fuss or outcry by the rugby community, in fact I’m guessing that his ‘controversial’ comeback might be news to many.
There are other doping cases which rarely get mentioned. Jean Pierre Elissalde in France, Arthur Bouwer (Nambia) Monde Hodebe (Sharks), Western Force’s Ryan Louwrens (when a junior in South Africa) and Nqoba Mxili (Blue Bulls). And then we come to New Zealand where four players were recently suspended including former U20s and 7s star Glen Robertson and Zoe Berry a Black Fern in 2012. And that might not be the end of it with a former supplier considering turning whistleblower on his clients.
It’s about time rugby started discussing the D word much more openly and fully. And I’m not talking Defence.