i know we won. i ve seen the jerseys with me with my hands in the air at twickenham, but i can t remember being on the pitch. so you played in the game, you ve got the shirt, but you don t remember the game at all? at all. what i ve been told is my brain was so inflamed at that period. and most.most of my career, i ve said before, i can t remember because we were doing so much contact, my brain was inflamed. so you. the memories weren t storing. so you had an inflamed brain because of the contact you were doing. yes. ..and the hits you were taking, and you were still turning out for wales? wales. clu b. training. wow. years after he retired from rugby, alix found his memory getting worse. i got lost on a bike ride and it s a bike ride i ve done 50, 70 times. and ijust had a blackout moment and didn t know where i was, and ended up cycling the way i came,
known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy or cte. it s what alix believes has happened to him, and notjust in the games themselves. the amount of contact i did in training for my clubs, the amount of games that i played it s most probably more than 100,000. when you turn professional driving line outs, tackling, bone on bone, 15 against 15 there was always contact every day. we only see in people who ve had a history of brain injury, this chronic traumatic encephalopathy. a direct link causation is a really difficult thing to prove, but i think there s more than enough evidence that, on a balance of probabilities, being exposed to repetitive head impacts and head injuries in your younger part of life is not good for late outcomes. until somebody comes forward with evidence that banging your head over and over and overand overagain is safe, we should just review
but it can be things like short term post concussion syndrome, epilepsy and so on. 50% of the rugby playing community? potentially up to that amount. i mean, we believe this is an epidemic, ultimately. the scale and cause of the problem is hotly debated throughout rugby. former international jamie roberts wants better understanding of a problem that could be an issue for many players. it s very kind of sad to hear their stories and, look, i ve spoken to alix, erm. ..and it makes me a bit worried, there s no doubt about that. you know, this causation piece is huge for the game. if you could turn round and say, right, rugby causes this, you know, 100%, without failure, well, then we re having a different conversation. but that s not established yet. everyone wants more research. but the dangers of
so you could just carry on. and now we know, i mean, that. we know. but they knew then. people knew then that the information, the research was there, but we weren t told. so it wasn t. world rugby, the governing bodies didn t filter down to the coaches, didn t filter down to the medical staff that these. . .that this existed. in december, alix popham and a small group of former players announced they were suing world rugby, the rfu and the welsh rugby union over brain damage. their lawyer believes this is just the beginning. well, based on everything we ve seen to date, based on what our experts have read, we believe up to 50% of the rugby playing community could be impacted by some kind of neurological impairment. that s not to say that everybody would end up with dementia or a disease at the extreme end of the spectrum.
as a top professional coach. what was the learning curve for you about the dangers of concussion, and that a head knock wasn t just something you could get up and carry on with? actually, there was a little bit of a finger in the air, you know? i mean, i ve been on many coaching qualification courses and very little was spoken about concussion, you know, and that s why i felt vulnerable when incidents happen. you know, as a coach, you know, what position would i have been in to make a decision on a player the following week? when you look at players like alix popham, what does that make you think about the way they were treated? i feel very sad about that. you know, having coached alix when he was a 17, 18 year old, to see him now, as a friend. suffering, struggling, it s very, very sad. i retired in 2011 and that was the attitude. a bang to the head wasn t classed as an injury,