Which Australian sport produces the greatest athletes? Part Four: Rugby union

The fourth sport in our series is rugby union. The sport they say they play in heaven is far and away the most brutal, hellish spectacle from an athletic perspective.

Think about it from the viewpoint of a few salient facts and figures. The average weight of a professional rugby union player is 102 kilograms. 154 of the 507 listed Super Rugby players weigh in over 110 kilograms, and eight tip the scales at 130 kilograms plus.

That is almost the size of the average NFL lineman, men who wrestle and run into each other with not much more than a metre’s distance between them from a standing start, with protective padding and helmets.

This is what physical contact in rugby union looks like.

“Rugby union is all about strength,” says our expert rugby league coach Rohan Smith.

“The collisions are different to rugby league, where it is more about the impact of the hit itself. In union, bodies don’t run into each other as frequently, and there is more ripping of the ball, pushing in scrums, clearing out rucks and the like.

“This is all about brute strength, rather than what we would define as power actions.”

We see this play out in the transition professional players have made between league and union in recent years. I asked Rohan which transition was smoother: moving from league to union or from union to league.

Backs can switch sports with relative ease, but to underscore the athletic requirements of being a rugby union forward, Rohan said it was physically challenging as well as mentally scary.

“Transitioning from league to union to become a forward is extremely difficult. Union forwards seem to be either taller and heavier, or shorter and heavier than league players. Also, the massive technical nature of the lineout and scrums would scare league players away from that transition!”

(AAP Image/Dave Hunt)

He also notes that the highest profile transitions between league and union have seen strong-bodied forwards like Sonny Bill Williams and Sam Burgess move from rugby league forward positions to rugby league backline positions. Strength matters a lot.

Rohan spoke to a former Super Rugby player to understand the weekly routine and demands of playing professional union. It’s weights, weights, and more weights.

“After a game on Friday, a player would have Saturday for recovery and game review and Sunday off,” Rohan’s contact said.

“Then Monday we would begin with a video session with our position group, followed by some skills, before hitting the gym hard in the afternoon. Tuesday is even heavier gym work with a bit of video review.

“Wednesday we would step back a little – massages, swimming, recovery, before Captain’s Run on Thursday.”

There is also a clearer distinction between forwards (positions one through eight) and backs (nine through 15) in rugby union than in rugby league, where, as we discussed previously, the lines are increasingly blurred.

According to a study by the University of Cape Town, the average rugby union backline player had 120 separate pieces of contact (running into another player, on the same team or opposition) per 80 minutes of game time; a forward had 300 – more than twice as many.

Where the backs do more of their work is on the outside, running in open space and in tight with great agility. A GPS study by the University of Chestershire in the UK found a union front rower travelled an average of 4.45 kilometres in an 80-minute game, compared to 6.84 kilometres for a scrum-half.

The intensity of running varied significantly too. A front-rower spends more than 80 per cent of their distance travelled moving at low speeds – jogging, walking or gentle runs – to help out at rucks. Back-rowers, by contrast, are running for about half of their distance travelled, and sprinting for close to a kilometre per game.

This sounds like a lot, particularly for men that, on average, weigh in at more than 100 kilograms. But in reality, it pales in comparison to Australian rules football, which has an average distance of 17.5 kilometres in 108 minutes of playing time, and even cricket, with its 23-kilometre average over a six-hour day in the field, as we discovered earlier in the series.

(AAP Image/Richard Wainwright)

A perhaps underappreciated athletic feature of union players is their agility, particularly when put into the context of the sheer volume of matter players carry with them when they step and shimmy and fend off.

Australian rules fans go nuts every time a player is able to break a tackle using a fend or similar move; they happen as a matter of course in every phase of play in rugby union.

Even though I’m an Aussie rules guy for the most part, not many plays in any sport in the world fire me up more than an 80-metre cross-field try.

While we’re talking about the professional domestic level athletes in this series, it would be remiss of me not to mention the thing union does better than any other sport in the world: the pre-match build up to international games.

Key Information

Ryan and Rohan are making these judgments based on the highest level of domestic competition in each of the sports – except for cricket, where the Australian Test team seems like the more appropriate comparator.

In this series, each sport will be ranked on key categories. We’ll reveal the final scores and the top sport at the end of the series.

Endurance: the length of time an athlete is required to perform at their peak, in a game and over the course of a season.
Power: how explosive an athlete needs to be, in both speed and strength terms, over and above the “resting” state of play.
Agility: a measure of an athlete’s required evasiveness, ability to change direction and be aware of those around them.
Speed: how fast is a player required to move around the field, both in sprints and general play.

Stay tuned for the next instalment when we’ll discuss soccer (or football).

The full series
» Part One: AFL
» Part Two: Cricket
» Part Three: Rugby league
» Part Four: Rugby union
» Part Five: Football
» Part Six: Final Results

This series is sponsored by by POWERADE, fuelling rivalry through the POWERADE POWERSCORE. The Powerade Powerscore, developed in conjunction with the New South Wales Institute of Sport, allows you to compare yourself to mates and elite athletes.