Ian Herbert: The most vulnerable lads are the likeliest victims of rugby's drug culture

COMMENT: The physique of a player now, compared with when the sport turned pro, is extraordinary

Martin Gleeson scores for Wigan in the 2010 Grand Final, the year before his 18-month ban for a positive drug test (GETTY IMAGES)

It is a measure of the obscure territory occupied by those rugby league players below the top grade that you will probably never have heard of the Featherstone Rovers forward Shaun Pick. He is 21, a talent who seemed destined for a Super League profile and all that it brings when Castleford Tigers signed him from local amateur club Lock Lane, and who then moved to Huddersfield Giants.

He dropped to Championship level 18 months ago, with Featherstone, and the kind of existence down there which perhaps goes a little way to explaining why, last November, he tested positive for the anabolic steroid oxymetholone following an out-of-competition test. He is now banned from all sports until December 2016.

There’s certainly minimal money outside rugby league’s limelight, a place where only three clubs are full-time and where a £200 match fee is about the going rate for all the rest. You can imagine the temptation there must have been to break the rules for the marginal gains to make it back to the big time.

The ways and means to get such an artificial advantage are within easy reach for those who play rugby of either code. The bodybuilding world intersects with rugby at that level and gymnasiums provide the environment which allows many players below elite level to make ends meet. You’ll find plenty of them running classes and gyms. Supplements and steroids come with the territory. And then it starts crossing into sport.

Many say these stimulants are not used in a wilful attempt to cheat. Young men take them without even knowing their chemical names because they are a part of life in the gym, and then discover they are in breach of rugby rules. The most vulnerable ones are those who know the gym culture first, are encouraged to “come down to the rugby”, treat both environments just the same and then get caught out.

But that is a generous interpretation of the motives. UK Anti-Doping certainly believes that some of the crimes are deliberate; that getting a competitive advantage and a foothold in lucrative rugby is part of the calculation. The scandal, first revealed by the Mail on Sunday two years ago, which resulted in Hull FC’s chief executive and former conditioning coach both being banned from the game, showed the lengths to which rugby league has gone to cover its tracks. The full tawdry, systemic cover-up emerged from the testimony of former Great Britain centre Martin Gleeson, who was initially banned for two years.

The drug in question in that case was a stimulant, though in a little-reported interview last week, UKAD’s new chief executive, Nicole Sapstead, described the “dramatic” increase in the use of anabolic steroids in rugby and expressed concern that the increasing focus on players’ size and strength was encouraging their use.

“The shape and the physique of a rugby player now is just extraordinary,” Sapstead told the Associated Press’s Rob Harris, who reported her concern that low academic attainment from some of those young men in question was a part of the problem. “There are boys who maybe aren’t ever going to do well academically, so they think, ‘Well, OK… my only way of achieving something good is in sport and I’ve got someone bearing down on me going, You’ve got to be faster, fitter, bigger, stronger’,” Sapstead said.

There’s no delicate way of saying that some of the aspiring young rugby players we are talking about just don’t have the intellectual faculty to analyse what they are taking or absorb clubs’ educational messages. And some semi-professional clubs evidently don’t have the time or inclination to hammer that message home.

“There’s a culture that says if you fail the test it’s your own fault for being an idiot,” says one who knows the scene.

It is against this background that rugby tops a table that it least wants to be on: UKAD’s list of sportsmen currently serving anti-doping rule violations.

No fewer than 24 of the 35 most recent bans imposed for these violations come from rugby – and 13 of the last 15. Sapstead believes World Rugby and the Rugby Football Union have worked hard to tackle the problem at elite level. But below that there is a problem.

Part of the challenge is getting the problem recognised. Many in the world of British cycling are bemused by the renewed doubts about their sport as a result of the assertion, in the Cycling Independent Reform Commission’s recent report, that the doping problem has shifted “to layers below the top road cyclist level”. Two weeks of searching for evidence of this have led me to conclude that the levels are inconsequential compared with rugby.

The cyclists taking testosterone and steroids are those competing in “sportive” events, for which there is only the kudos and ego boost of a high-placed finish, not a career boost. “It’s the business executive who has spent £10,000 on a custom-built carbon bike and knows a bloke down the gym who can give him something to help make all that lay-out worthwhile,” as one source describes it to me.

British rugby’s habit is affecting many more young men and some are the ones who need help: impressionable, low-attaining individuals, down at the bottom end of the ladder of sport and life.

Shaun Pick seems to be getting on with things, surfacing on social media last week to tweet out an image of his former Huddersfield team-mates: occupants of that gilded Super League world for which he gambled everything and lost.

Power to the people at last – no thanks to the World Cup

“We’ve finally got our poles,” my friend Lucia Scalco wrote to tell me this week. “You played a part.” She was talking about the electricity poles which were needed to bring a power supply to Morro da Cruz, an impoverished community on the outskirts of the Brazilian city Porto Alegre.

When I reported from there during the World Cup, young boys were twisting wires from the overhead cabling to create an electricity supply, sometimes killing themselves in the process.

Lucia was being too generous. Morro got its poles through campaigning, fighting and endless resourcefulness.

Fifa’s World Cup had long since moved on, leaving the same destitution and useless multi-million pound football stadiums in its wake.