Rugby Player Welfare, Part 2: ‘Rugby Is Not the NFL’…Not Yet, Anyway

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at Internationaled.org

Published: August 1, 2013

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"Rugby is not NFL Football."

That was the claim made by an International Rugby Board (IRB) representative recently. The comment came in response to a series of investigative reports from Ben Heather of New Zealand's Dominion Post.

Mr. Heather has joined others, including your humble correspondent here at Bleacher Report, in looking into the validity of that statement.

Rugby versus Football Numbers: An Inconvenient Truth   Rapid Player Weight Gain: A Game for All Sizes? Brain Trauma in Rugby: Asking Difficult Questions Only two weeks ago, I posted part one of this series in which I looked at the damning comments put forward by Scotland international Rory Lamont. Lamont's claims about player welfare have created quite the stir in the global rugby community.



In that report, I also shared two of the catalysts that had moved me to examine the issue of player welfare in rugby more closely: the death of several young rugby players in recent months and the current campaign by New Yorker columnist Malcom Gladwell to bring awareness to the issue of brain trauma—also known as Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE)—in contact sports.



Rugby versus Football Numbers: An Inconvenient Truth

Specifically, Gladwell has focused his attention on American football, where some of the most serious evidence of player trauma is now being accumulated.

But how different is elite football from rugby, and how much to we really know about the risks today's rugby players are undertaking?

That multiple players have died from head trauma in rugby within the last calendar year is matter of recent public record.

A 2011 study out of the Auckland University of Technology (AUT)—one used in official IRB literature—looked at the issue of how dangerous rugby was in comparison to other contact sports and other activities where a participant i...
Article Source: Bleacher Report - Rugby Union

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