How much is too much?
In 1992 John Hoberman quoted a prominent sports physician as saying over the past century Olympic sport has been nothing less than ‘a gigantic biological experiment carried out on the human organism.' By extension we can look at this as referring to all sports, as more and more techniques continue to be used to try to make our athletes the best they can be on the field, with the possible side-effects often overlooked or ignored.
Of course, this is an issue that is far larger than just one team, league or sport. But it can be seen almost anywhere you look and while rugby may not have sunk to quite the same lows as other sports around the world, it is interesting to consider its role in this ‘gigantic biological experiment.'
The most striking difference between today's rugby players and the players of yesteryear comes in their size. There seems to be an obsession with building players up to be giants in this day and age. But there are inevitably side effects of this.
As the players get bigger and stronger, the hits they are able to put in, the impacts the body must endure, become ever more forceful. Of course there is only so many knocks the human body can take and as it is being subjected to substantially heavier ones than in the past, it is hardly surprising the number of injuries picked up these days seems to have risen.
You must ask yourself how much the methods they use to put this extra weight on have to do with these extra injuries too. The number of players going down in trainings and during the pre-season in recent years has been simply ridiculous. Accidents happen and it is inevitable that there will be some injuries, but in the modern day we are seeing them far more often than we would have done even ten years ago. Surely every effort should be made to ensure that players are not being injured in training so that they are able to play in the actual games, as they are not much use to anyone on the sidelines.
Everyone remembers the injury problems that plagued the Highlanders through the early part of last year, as a star-studded team fell to pieces. But we must ask ourselves why this happened in the first place. Sure some of them were unlucky, such as the early season injury to Nasi Manu. Others were not necessarily unavoidable either, such as the recovery period for Tamati Ellison.
But that hardly seems to even scratch the surface of the problems they were having. In the final pre-season game they had to get a member of the coaching staff to fill in, which is just ridiculous given the season had not even started yet. You have got to think the pre-season training regime must have had something to do with it. While it is important to be fit for the season, it is also important to not over-train, as it is not much good having the most aerobically fit and strong team in the world if half of them cannot play.
It does become a balancing act and perhaps you do risk your players going in under-done. But at the same time this is a professional organisation, with coaches and trainers whose job it is to know exactly how hard to push these players to get them in tip-top physical condition. Just as it is important for the players on the field to perform, it is important for these people to perform too, to ensure the team is in the best shape it can be heading into the season.
You have to wonder about some of the logic of wanting players to bulk up anyway. While in general a good big man will beat a good little man, there are exceptions and you must look at the trade-offs of putting on weight, particularly if the player is playing well enough without it.
Take a player like Buxton Popoalii, who it had been said they were trying to put some weight on last year after coming into the side. While he is not the biggest player, you really have to question the logic of this. The main attraction in Popoalii's game is his speed and agility, a player who is capable of getting through holes in the defence and possessing a devastating step. By putting extra weight on do you not risk losing some of this? The extra kilograms may help with some parts of his game, but when you go messing with something that could disturb a player's best attribute, there seems little logic.
Is it a case of just doing something because we can, looking to make every player into the well-built giant that the modern game expects? Even at secondary school level we are seeing it. School players are hitting the gym and taking whatever supplements to build themselves up to be as big and strong as they can be. No one questions this, it is just the way things are done, for now anyway.
Why not try something a bit different? Think back 15 years ago, when the likes of Jeff Wilson and Christian Cullen were amongst the best players on the planet. Neither was huge by the standards of the game back then and both would most likely be considered too small in today's game. Yet can you imagine either player not flourishing if thrown into a game of the current-era. Both were players with speed, agility, the ability to create something from nothing as they ran in a well-balanced manner to score many a try. They were players who would look to avoid contact, rather than smash their way through it. Defensively they would find it tougher, but both were adept tacklers and in general, a player who wants to make a tackle will make it.
We saw the value of a player with these abilities in Ben Smith last season. Why not try to develop more players along these lines? Being bigger is good where it is needed, but if it is not necessary a player should not be pushed, especially in a case such as Popoalii's. At the very least it should hopefully decrease the injury rate at training.
Once the players are on the field, it is a different story though. As was noted, as the players have become bigger and stronger, the hits are getting harder and the body can only take so much. Unfortunately, this is an easier problem to identify than to solve. It does pose the question though of where all of this is going. Surely something has to give, eventually.
It really is a question with few answers. To some extent at least, you need your players to match the size of the opposition, yet in doing this the impacts taken continue to increase and the knocks become harder and harder to take. We carry on with it though and for now it seems as though the importance of winning is seen as being greater than the well-being of the players.
And if this is the case and winning means so much, what is next? Is it inevitable that performance-enhancing drugs will creep into the game as they have in other sports? Or what about the medical procedures undertaken to rebuild or even enhance an athletes' capabilities, such as laser eye surgery?
Maybe all of this seems a long way off. But that a player like Jeff Wilson would be seen as being too small to get a look-in at the highest level would have seemed a long way off ten years ago, yet in today's game that is something of a reality. The game has changed with professionalism, all in the name of winning games and making today's players and teams the best they can be.
But at what cost has this happened and is it being over-done? Most importantly we must ask, what does all of this mean for the future of our game? For now we can only speculate and only time will tell, as the giant biological experiment goes on and on.
