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AAfter Steve Thompson won the 2003 World Cup, he participated in the victory parade through the West End, was chosen as one of the three best players in the world and went to Buckingham Palace, where he was awarded an MBE. Thompson also won a Grand Slam, as well as a European Cup with Northampton Saints, and played for the British & Irish Lions. Now, at the age of 42, he has been diagnosed with early-onset dementia and probable chronic traumatic encephalopathy. “It’s rugby that has put me through this,” he says. And that’s why, if I could, I would undo it all. “Some people prefer big lights, while I don’t want that. I never wanted that. I would rather have had a normal life. “
Thompson was working in Kendal not long ago, living away from home while repairing a burst water pipe. While there, they showed some of England’s 2003 World Cup games on television. I’ve never seen them before, except for little snippets when they were doing their post-match analysis during the tournament. But it did now. “And it was like he was watching England play now. Except I was there. But I don’t remember ever being there at all. Honestly, I don’t know the scores for any of the games. “Much of his career is like this, patchy and full of gaps. He used to take pride in his memory and had a head full of complicated calls to the lineout.” If you put them now , there is no chance. No way. “
These days, you forget. Forget directions, what parts of a book you have read, and what TV shows you have watched. Sometimes he even forgets his wife’s name. “Sometimes I could look at Steph. And she says it’s like she’s completely blank. And she would say, ‘I’m Steph.’ The name is gone. Gone. “He also suffers from anxiety and has started having panic attacks. Sometimes he finds that he becomes aggressive for no good reason.” It’s weird. It’s a bit of an out-of-body experience, to be honest, and it happens a lot more now. “
And he wonders what the meaning of all this was, why did he spend all those years playing a game that, according to him, has brought him here. “I ended up with nothing really in the end.” Not even memories. “I can not remember it. I have no memories. I have no feelings about it. You see us lifting the World Cup and I can see myself jumping there. But I can’t remember. “The money is gone too.” No one could say I’m money oriented, because that’s the only thing I’m not. I just wanted a simple life. I wish I could work outside and use my body and my mind. That’s not going to happen now. “
What you have is guilt. Steph is younger than him – “and I’m thinking, what have I done to him? She doesn’t deserve this. “She has taken the diagnosis in stride.” She just said, ‘I’ll have to take care of you, won’t I?’ “But he’s worried about how she’ll cope.” I’m not a little guy, already. You know, I’m 6 foot 3 inches, 120 kilos. So if you have to take care of me, that’s quite a bit of meat to go. “
Thompson started playing when he was 15 years old. “Was he the great love of my life? No, no, not really. But it was a job. It turned out that he was good at it in those days. I enjoyed the company of the boys and things like that. But then would I do it again? No, I wouldn’t. “He has four children, the youngest being a one-year-old boy. They still go down to the local rugby club, on the social side.” But I really don’t want my son to play rugby, like he is in this moment. “He watches the players” beat each other like hell “and worries.” You know, when you’re younger, you feel a little macho and you feel like you can’t break down. “
That’s how he was. Thompson was one of the first generation of professional gamers. When he started, he was training two nights a week. Remember the switch to full-time training. “It was like, ‘So what do we do now?’ It felt like the coaches were thinking, ‘We will just hit each other. That’s what we’ll do. ‘ And we did. “It was worse when he was called up to play for England.” It was so brutal during the week that you came home on Thursday for your day off and I just said, ‘I don’t think I can play, I feel completely abused.’ .
Gambling in those early professional years had a brutal culture, says Thompson. “They had us for that Six Nations period and the Fall Internationals, and they literally scold you until you broke down.” They returned to training two days after winning the World Cup. Many of them played for their clubs the next weekend. It made him feel like “a little meat”. But he was so eager to be dropped that he kept going.
It assumes that many players from that era may end up having similar problems. “I can see the numbers are high, especially for the first players to arrive, from 96 to 97 until the mid-2000s, actually. He could see that attitudes were changing at the end of his career. “The 2011 World Cup camp was completely different from the 2003 World Cup camp. In 2011 it was much more technical, whereas in 2003 you just had to give yourself a beast.”
As always with the brain, there are many things that we cannot know for sure. These diagnoses are a deeply disturbing development for players so young. Collecting what science likes to call “hard data” takes many years and many studies, which is a small comfort to those who live with some repercussion in the here and now. It was not until 2019 that science established a higher incidence of mortality from neurodegenerative disease among professional soccer players of the 20th century. Rugby is likely to seek a stronger association. Most players, we must wait, will not be affected. The reality is that we will begin to find out only as they age. And even then, are there any risks simply based on sports or other factors?
Rugby is 150 years old. Why is this a problem now?
If these cases of dementia are symptomatic of a new phenomenon, the key event appears to be when elite rugby players engaged full time in the 1990s. Not only did the physical damage of the 80 minutes escalate dramatically, the players they were subjected to contact training throughout the week. A group of players intend to bring a legal case against the rugby authorities alleging that they are owed a duty of care given the emerging evidence of the dangers.
Aren’t the players better managed now?
Yes. The training is much more sophisticated than in the Wild West of the early professional era. The awareness and treatment of head injuries have also been transformed in the last decade. Unfortunately, with better preparation of the players, the intensity of the 80 minutes on the field has continued to increase. There is no way to know if the net effect of this relative change in load from week to weekend mitigates the risks.
What can rugby do?
This is probably / hopefully a problem restricted to the elite game, where dropout rates are much higher. Some measures are already in place since the Thompson generation played. Head injuries need to be treated with more care. Science is on the cusp of developing technologies to detect brain injuries more efficiently and quickly, but this could be a double-edged sword if it continues to reveal a much higher incidence than previously thought. Current attempts to change the nature of the game are likely to be hopelessly peripheral. There is no easy answer to that.
He didn’t worry about it, because he thought he didn’t have to. “I don’t service my own car. Someone else does that, because that’s what they do. I was there to play rugby. And then you have people who take care of you. “But the players, in that culture, with the absence of regulation, were not protected.” You think about how many specialists were out there watching that and not saying anything, “he says.” They knew it. what was going on. And nothing was done about it. People were getting hit in the head and it wasn’t being recorded. I’m knocked out in training and it was always, ‘It’s just a hit to the head, it’ll be fine.’
“In the old days it was kind of funny. If someone got hit on the head, it was, ‘Oh look at him, he had a belt! He’ll be up in a minute. ” One of his doctors asked him how many concussions he had had. Thompson asked what counted as a concussion. “Is it when you are not totally unconscious? And he said, ‘No, that’s not true anymore.’ And I said, ‘Well, I was doing it every training session then, really, when you look at it.
“The amount of head hits I had in training. I was known for it. ‘Oh, he’s sleeping a bit, he’ll be up in a minute.’ Remember all the grueling sessions at the scrum machines. “There is a lot of pressure. They don’t move, they have pegs, they have people standing and you drive towards it, with all that weight. “It would push to the point where his head starts to move.” And suddenly, when the pressure goes away, you start to see the light, the little white dots and you don’t know where you are for a few seconds. “
He is angry at the clubs, who believe they have not provided proper aftercare, angry at the Rugby Football Union, and angry at the Rugby Players Association, who believe they should fight harder for the players. “I don’t want to kill the game. I want it regulated. “He thinks professional players should be allowed to play only if they have a brain scan at the beginning of each season.” Every year he drives his car he gets a technical inspection. The body is exactly the same. If not it works, it shouldn’t be doing its job. It sounds horrible, because the guys are going to have to retire at 22 or 23. But trust me, it’s better to finish than to be where I am now. “
