Were the All Blacks poisoned?

In this exclusive piece from Watching the World Cup in 2007, Spiro looks at one of rugby’s greatest mysteries. Were the All Blacks, in fact, poisoned before the 1995 tournament decider against South Africa?

So we come to the greatest mystery of all five World Cup tournaments to date: were the All Blacks poisoned before the 1995 final? And if they were, who was behind it?
This sensational and controversial event deserves a thorough examination.

Here is what happened, according to New Zealand sources whom I’ve interviewed, and others who have written about the affair in the years since…

The staggers that afflicted the All Blacks began on the previous Thursday. Around five o’clock that afternoon, manager Colin Meads rang coach Laurie Mains to tell him that Andrew Mehrtens was violently ill. Meads had arranged for the five-eighth to have a room of his own to recover from whatever bug he had caught.

Mains, Meads and five players who were not part of the match squad for Saturday then went out to dinner. Mains managed to eat an entrée but could not continue with his meal. An overpowering nausea made him feel weak and vulnerable to vomiting. Kevin Schuler, a tough, loose forward and a player of exceptional fitness, said he couldn’t eat anything. The meal was called off and the group returned to their hotel by the team bus.

Meads was first into the lobby, where Zinzan Brooke came up to him. Mains could see what was happening as if it were a slow-motion film sequence. “My heart dropped,” he said later.

“The boys are crook,” Brooke told Meads. “They’re spewing up all over the place. They’re falling like flies.”

By this stage Jeff Wilson had already had an injection from the team doctor.

Meads went up to his room, vomited repeatedly, collapsed, and was so ill a doctor was called to attend to him. He was forced to remain in bed throughout Friday, the first time in his life he had spent a day in bed sick.

An emergency ward along the lines of M*A*S*H was set up in the room of the team doctors, John Mayhew and Mike Bowen. Players stumbled, almost crawled, to the room for injections and pills. At 2:30 on Friday morning, only 36 hours before the final, All Blacks’ main line-out jumper Ian Jones staggered in. He had been stricken hours before, but had not wanted to wake a doctor or Robin Brooke, who was sound asleep in the next bed. Then, as his vomiting intensified, he had worried whether he would actually live through the night.

“Just get me through the night, Doc,” he pleaded. He was amazed to see a number of All Blacks in the doctors’ room complaining about vomiting and diarrhoea.

“You’re number 22,” he was told.

In his authorised biography, Brian Lochore, a former All Black and senior member of the tour management, is reported as saying that the planning for the World Cup campaign was so detailed that management had talked in advance about the possibility of food poisoning. Part of the reason for the meticulous planning was that the management had received several warnings that there would be foul play against the team off the field by people determined to ensure a New Zealand defeat.

It had been decided that from the Monday before the final, all meals would be eaten in the main dining room of the team’s hotel; players were not to go out to restaurants. And what they ate was to be supervised. During the pool rounds of the tournament, the All Blacks had a personal chef in Cape Town. It was decided he would be invited to cook for them in Johannesburg.

A day or so after they arrived, Lochore asked Mike Bowen how the chef was working out.

“He wasn’t able to come,” Bowen told him. In Cape Town, the team’s chef had the use of a spare kitchen, but the hotel officials in Johannesburg had told Mains this type of arrangement was not possible there.

Lochore felt “a shudder of apprehension, even premonition” at this news.

The critical lunch took place on the Thursday in the team’s private dining room. The menu for the day was hamburgers, chicken burgers, lasagne, sandwiches, fruit juice, milk, tea and coffee. Sean Fitzpatrick and the Brooke brothers, Robin and Zinzan, arrived late and did not eat anything. They did drink tea and coffee with their teammates, but not from the urns of coffee and tea that had been made prior to the All Blacks coming into the dining room. Instead, they had fresh pots made for them.

These three players were the only members of the All Blacks’ final squad who did not fall ill. This led the team doctors, when they explored the sequence of events, to presume that the tea and coffee, and possibly the food as well, may have been laced by someone who was not a member of the hotel staff.

Dan Retief, one of the best rugby writers in South Africa and a notably fair commentator, insists the poisoning story is a concoction by the management of the All Black squad, a group unwilling, even year later, to face up to the fact that the 1995 World Cup was won by the Springboks.

“Why was no investigation launched to establish the real cause of what infected the team?” Retief asked in an article reviewing the tournament.

The answer is that the All Blacks’ management had two major problems to resolve.

Firstly, the players had to be carefully looked after to ensure they could take their place’in the final. As most of the team were afflicted, including the reserves, substitutions were not possible. Nor could the match be delayed until the players had recovered, as the World Cup television schedules were set in cement.

Secondly, news of the poisoning had to be kept as secret as possible. The Springboks would have had a huge psychological advantage, along with their physical advantage, if they had known they were to play a team of stricken players. So an investigation was held back to ensure that as few people outside the team as possible (none, the All Black management hoped) would know what was going on.

Wynne Gray, The New Zealand Herald‘s chief rugby writer and probably the New Zealand journalist with the best connections and information, accepts that most of the All Blacks were “sick, desperately ill in the days leading up to the final”, but does not believe they were poisoned.

“I remember lurching out of the lift on the All Blacks’ floor the night before the final, looking for the team doctor,” he recalled in an article. “Like a few other New Zealand journalists and, I’m sure, a number of other guests, late that week I also felt sick and was suffering from diarrhoea.”

Gray maintains he did not share the All Blacks’ drink trolley. He believes the team were simply victims of a bug doing the rounds in Johannesburg at the time.

And this is the official South African Rugby Football Union version too. In 1997 I noted in an article in the Sydney Morning Herald about the British and Irish tour of South Africa then taking place: “Raising echoes of 1995 and the poisoning of the All Blacks was the news that, before their last Test against the Springboks, half the Lions’ squad were stricken with a stomach bug.”

My linking of the two incidents provoked a furious letter to me and my editor from Alex Broun, the South African Rugby Football Union’s media manager.

“First, it is agreed,” Broun thundered, “that the All Blacks did suffer from some kind of stomach bug shortly before the 1995 Rugby World Cup, but no cause has been established. To say that the team was deliberately ‘poisoned’ is completely groundless. Numerous rumours abound, but according to the hotel where the alleged ‘poisoning’ took place some of the All Blacks, bored by a rigid dietary plan imposed by the team doctor, ventured out to local takeaway joints in the week before the final.

“Tests carried out on bottles of peri-peri sauce purchased at one of these takeaways, and found in several of the All Blacks’ rooms, indicated that diarrhoea and vomiting for a period of up to 24 hours could result from ingestion of the contents. Unhygienic fast food – hardly a conspiracy.”

Well no, but no All Black has ever confirmed this story about the peri-peri sauce bottles. And the All Blacks who did not eat and drink at the hotel were the only ones not stricken.

Meanwhile, the possibility of foul play has received support from a most unlikely quarter – Louis Luyt, a belligerent fertiliser millionaire and powerbroker for the South African Rugby Football Union.

On the eve of the 2003 World Cup final in Sydney, Luyt revealed in his autobiography, Walking Proud, that the Springboks, too, had been poisoned in 1995. Food poisoning had, he said, flattened most of the squad just before their 27-18 victory over Australia in the opening match.

Luyt blamed dodgy pasta. The chefs, he reported, were quickly sacked “because of fears the team was vulnerable to further sabotage”.

If the Springboks were vulnerable to sabotage in South Africa, how much more vulnerable might the All Blacks have been?

The Gray and Broun scenarios, too, contain fatal flaws. Gray was stricken on Friday, the day after the All Blacks fell ill. He may well have been eating at one of the unhygienic fast-food places to which Broun referred. His story does not account for the fact that most of the All Blacks were struck down after having their midday meal in their private dining room, nor that the only players not afflicted were those who either did not eat that fateful midday meal, or did not use the drink trolley.

For Broun’s story to be correct, Sean Fitzpatrick and the Brooke brothers, the players who broke the eating-out rule, should have been the ones struck down.

A tenet of philosophy called Occam’s Razor states that where there are two competing theories, the simplest explanation should be preferred. In this case, the explanation that most simply fits the facts is that the All Blacks were poisoned. Allegations of poisoning by teams in South Africa are not unusual, as the Luyt example shows.

And there was another curious incident. At the All Blacks’ training session on the Thursday morning, before returning to their hotel for lunch, Frank Bunce picked up a water bottle, took a sip, and threw it to the ground, complaining about the taste.

Robin Brooke tried a tiny sip. “This water tastes like shit,” he told his brother.

Zinzan Brooke threw the bottle to the team doctor, Mike Bowen, saying, “Taste this, there’s something wrong with it.”

As it happened, the Thursday practice was the only occasion on which Bowen had not himself filled the bottles with distilled water. This incident raises the possibility that two attempts were made to poison the All Blacks before the final.

How, then, was the poisoning carried out? And who ordered it?

In November 1996, Mike Bowen told journalists he had learned of a herb known in South Africa as ‘Indian trick’, which produced all the classic symptoms of the common stomach bug. The herb was a flavourless and odourless spice, which was easily added without those consuming the food or drink suspecting they had been tampered with.

This reinforces the findings of a private investigator hired and paid for by Laurie Mains after the tournament. The investigator confirmed that the All Blacks’ tea and coffee trolleys had been spiked. A hotel waitress named Susie admitted she had been given the Indian trick and paid to put it in the team’s drinks.

The ‘Susie Did It’ story has been ridiculed, but in March 2001 it received powerful endorsement from Rory Steyn, the former security head for President Nelson Mandela and later for the South African cricket team. (In June 2000, South African cricket captain Hansie Cronje confessed to him that he had engaged in match-fixing.)

In his autobiography One Step Behind Mandela: The Story of Rory Steyn, the security chief backed up Mike Bowen and Laurie Mains’ claims of poisoning. Steyn further asserted that Susie had been paid by a Far Eastern syndicate worried about the huge payout it would have to make if the All Blacks, the overwhelming favourites, won.

“The All Blacks’ loss,” Laurie Mains said later, “created a bookmakers’ bonanza.”

From Watching the Rugby World Cup by Spiro Zavos, 2007.