Calon (2 page)

A hundred and thirty years later, the stadium in which I’m standing tonight is testament to that union’s success.
With its position in the centre of the city, where a
cathedral
or a parliament might usually stand, it’s an eloquent embodiment of the place rugby occupies in Welsh
culture
. But why does rugby occupy that place? And why do the origins of the game continue to invest the sport with such meaning in Wales?

The most persistent resonance is a question of class. When a dispute over professionalism saw the
northern
English clubs break away from the Rugby Football Union in 1895, only Wales was left with a working-class rugby-union ethos. In northern England the new
professional
rugby league became dominant, while in southern England, Scotland and Ireland the union game played second fiddle to the populist sports of soccer and Gaelic football. Rugby union remained the preserve of public schools, universities and white-collar society. In Wales, however, the lifeblood of rugby continued to flow from the industrialised valleys and port towns, the ball passing through hands that spent the rest of their time cutting and hauling coal, rolling steel or loading ships.

The other home nations weren’t always comfortable with this class distinction. At the turn of the century there were even complaints that Wales had an unfair class advantage. As working men, it was argued, the Welsh were able to get into better condition than their
amateur
gentlemen opponents. At the 1903 AGM of the Irish RFU it was noted that:

The early association of rugby with a renewed sense of national identity also continues to contribute to its contemporary resonance in Wales. George Borrow, the nineteenth-century travel writer, wrote in his book
Wild Wales
that the Welsh character was partly shaped by the fact that ‘the Welsh have never forgotten they were
conquered
by the English, but the English have already
forgotten
’. With rugby’s territorial contest of possession and confrontation, Wales was gifted a communal way to
continue
that never forgetting. On a rugby field the
knowledge
that the Welsh and their language are stubborn survivors of a pre-Anglo-Saxon Britain is a rich seam of national consciousness which even in the twenty-first century is still evoked and defended every time Wales take the field.

Then there is the question of scale. Wales has always been a small nation. With a population of just three million, the country can draw upon roughly the same
number of players as Yorkshire. Its diminutive size means matches against opponents such as England, Ireland and France have always been laced with the potency of a David versus Goliath narrative, however much the
bookies
or the fans might favour Wales.

To what extent class, history and size are at the
forefront
of a twenty-first-century Welsh supporter’s mind as they watch a Wales match today is debatable. But what
is
certain is that this cultural heritage is still inherited and therefore, at the very least, still sensed. Similarly, a twenty-first-century Welsh player can’t escape the
traditions
they pull on with their jersey. Their minds might be occupied with video analysis, nutrition, team policy,
tactics
and preparation, but however diffuse the hinterland of Welsh rugby’s earliest days might be, it’s still a part of what fuels the modern player. Even those who play with individuals more than a nation in mind, those who take the field for the grandfathers, mothers, coaches who’ve helped them on their way, those individuals will all, in some way, have embodied the national ethos of the game. All of which goes to explain why it’s never just a country that runs out onto this pitch at the Millennium Stadium, but a culture, a way of being. Every match played by the national side is an act of national memory.

Over the last few years, as Welsh players have pulled on their jerseys in the dressing rooms they’ll have glimpsed a word printed inside their collars. The jersey itself
will have been made by an American company, Under Armour, constructed from some of the most high-tech materials of the twenty-first century. The military-grade fabric will feature ArmourGrid technology and
body-mapped
compression insets. The word inside each collar, though, will be thousands of years old and a reminder of the latticework of history and culture that’s still woven into what it means to play rugby for Wales.

Between 2008 and 2010 the word players saw inside the collar of their home shirt was ‘
Calon
’, meaning ‘heart’. In their away strip it was ‘
Hiraeth
’, meaning ‘a longing for something lost’.

From 2010 to 2011 they were reminded again, inside their home shirts, to ‘
Dal dy Dir
’ – ‘hold your ground’ – while in the away collar they wore ‘
Balchder
’ – ‘pride’.

Since 2011 the word players will have seen when pulling on their black away shirts is ‘
Cymeriad
’ – ‘character’. Inside their red home shirts it is ‘
Braint
’, meaning ‘privilege’.

Midnight.

A wave of cheers washes into the stadium from the streets of Cardiff beyond. 2012 has arrived. The first fireworks shoot into the night sky and explode in reds, greens and gold. In the empty bowl of the stadium,
resonating
between the stands, they sound like cannon fire. A rapid fusillade of smaller rockets crack and whistle from elsewhere in the city, disturbing a seagull from its perch
in the stadium’s roof. As it flies over me the growing lights on the pitch briefly illuminate it from underneath, casting its feathers as pristine as a player coming off the bench. More fireworks erupt in other areas of the city. The year has turned.

For the current Welsh squad, this new year poses a question first formed under the floodlights of another pitch on the other side of the world in what is now, just, last year. Wales were playing France at Eden Park in Auckland in the semi-finals of the Rugby World Cup. Commentators were calling it the biggest game in the history of Welsh rugby. Not just because the squad were eighty minutes from a final against the hosts, New Zealand, but because never before had a World Cup
semi-final
pointed so strongly towards a Welsh victory. France had been off form. Their tournament had been erratic and distracted. Virtually estranged from their coach, the team had yet to discover the rhythm or the flair that had seen them do so well in previous World Cups.

Wales, by contrast, despite fielding eight players under the age of twenty-three, had been the team of the
tournament
. For the first time in their history the national coach, Warren Gatland, had had the squad for two clear months of preparation. They’d twice travelled to
gruelling
training camps at Spała in Poland, where, with the aid of regular three-minute sessions in the –150°C
cryotherapy
chambers, they’d trained harder and more often than any other Welsh squad had ever trained before.

Rugby coaches often talk about ‘strength in depth’: developing enough quality players to cover injuries to the first-choice team. In Poland, however, Wales were
developing
a different kind of strength and depth. Under the eye of Adam Beard, the team’s head of physical
performance
, the players’ bodies were being strengthened to the point where, as centre Jamie Roberts put it, ‘you’re
thinking
about your next move, not your next breath’. But the Spała experience was also about developing depth – of resolve and attachment.

The modern top-flight rugby player is often a hard man who leads a soft life. At a young age he’ll have life experiences most of us will never know, and yet his experience of life will be relatively narrow. While their peers are going through an expansion of independence, the young rugby professional experiences a contraction. Much of their day-to-day lives is organised by someone else. Travel and schedules are set, day sheets appear under hotel doors, food and drink is monitored. They are given the best treatments and good salaries, but they also no longer work side by side for long hours in mines, fields or factories.

Warren Gatland and his team knew that Wales had often lost key games in the closing minutes. When the time had come to dig deep, that depth wasn’t there. At Spała, where Adam Beard says he pushed the squad ‘150% harder than ever before’, the players hurt, and they hurt together. As one group waited for another to finish
a session, there was silence in the room, such was the anxiety about what lay ahead of them. In the relatively simple surroundings of the camp, with no TV or
computer
games, they spent time together too. They talked, played cards and competed in quizzes. In previous squads there had always been some fighting between the
players
. But in Spała there was none. On their one day off, many chose to visit the nearby concentration camp at Auschwitz.

The Olympic Sports Centre in Spała was founded in 1950. Despite recent developments it still resembles a training camp for Soviet cosmonauts. Situated a
hundred
kilometres south-west of Warsaw, its buildings are located within hectares of oak forests through which herds of European bison once roamed. The village of just four hundred inhabitants is dominated by the centre’s presence. The ceiling of the nearby Olympic Pizzeria is papered with the front pages of a newspaper called
Sport
, while its menu offers a range of dishes all named after Olympic cities.

The centre’s three simple hotels – Champion, Junior and Olimpijczyk – sit squarely and heavily between its facilities of indoor and outdoor running tracks, gyms, a cavernous sports hall, swimming pool, treatment rooms and – Wales’s chief reason for being there – cryotherapy chambers. In their preparation for the World Cup the Welsh players stripped off twice a day to enter the icy vapour of these liquid-nitrogen-cooled freezers. Wearing
just a pair of shorts, long woollen socks, gloves, face mask, headband and wooden clogs, their blood pressures were taken by a nurse before they stepped, in groups of six, into the preliminary cooling chamber. A computer beside the chamber recorded its temperature as –50°C. The players crossed their arms, covering their nipples with their gloved hands as a member of staff dressed for an Arctic expedition opened the door to the secondary chamber. Outside on the computer screen the
temperature
in this second chamber can read anywhere from –120°C to –150°C.

Inside, it is a white-out. On stepping into this second chamber the players immediately lose sight of each other, their bodies lost in the freezing vapour. The sounds from beyond the chamber are muffled. Those inside have to keep talking to check in on each other, each man rocking from side to side or walking a tight pattern of steps. The cold is clean, dry and penetrating. The players’ brains, suddenly alert through instinctive survival, cause their blood vessels to contract and send endorphins streaming through their systems and blood rushing to their cores. Their skin temperature drops to below 12°C and the
seconds
begin to lag as any residual moisture – in the backs of the legs, in the crook of an arm – stings sharply. With a minute to go some of the players’ teeth are chattering. Others have broken into involuntary shivers. Eventually, the heavy metal door opens with a thick clunk and the players file into the preliminary chamber, then, after a
few seconds’ acclimatisation, out into the warmth, a flood of dry ice blowing out with them around their legs into the room.

After each of these cryotherapy sessions the squad took to the bikes and rowers in the gym across the corridor. With the stereo turned up they did twenty minutes of gentle exercise, pumping the blood through their veins to achieve the ‘vascular flush’ which would complete the treatment’s rehabilitation of their damaged tissues. The fundamental science behind this method is the same as that which has seen sports teams use ice baths and other cold therapies for many years. The aim is to reduce inflammation, produce endorphins and dampen the
nervous
system. By shortening recovery periods the players can do harder training sessions, more frequently. An ice bath, however, causes stress to a player’s skin. In
reaction
their blood, before flooding to the core, first rushes to the surface. The shock also produces stress hormones such as cortisol, which can counteract the benefits of the treatment. For the Welsh players, who can have as much as four inches of muscle packed about their limbs, there is also the question of penetration. An ice bath may only affect the first two inches of soft tissue, leaving deeper tissue still inflamed and damaged.

Whatever the science or the balance of the
physical
and psychological effects, the squad in Spała soon became convinced there was no way they could have trained as hard as they did without the cryotherapy. In
some weights sessions they lifted as much as four tonnes each. Every day they undertook levels of fitness training that would usually have left them aching all over with ‘the DOMS’ (Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness). The cryo, however, had them waking each morning feeling refreshed and able to continue with Adam’s punishing regime. Coaches often talk about muscle memory, but the use of cryotherapy at Spała was more about muscle amnesia: about wiping away the residue of physical
exertion
to leave the effect but not the ache, the gain but not the pain.

When not training inside at Spała, the squad worked on a pitch in front of Hotel Junior ringed by a running track and overlooked by a statue embedded in the
corner
of Hotel Champion. Sculpted in the Soviet style, a male figure places one hand on his chest, while the other holds aloft a flaming torch which he looks towards in aspiration. Next door to the training pitch, also under this statue’s gaze, the Park Pokolen´ Mistrzów Sportu commemorates Polish Olympic champions such as Jan Mulak, Irena Szewin´ska and Wanda Panfil.