The brawn identity

25 April 2014 - 10:07 By Simnikiwe Xabanisa
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TUSSLES WITH MUSCLES: Pierre Spies of the Bulls is one of many players who have sustained biceps injuries.
TUSSLES WITH MUSCLES: Pierre Spies of the Bulls is one of many players who have sustained biceps injuries.
Image: LEE WARREN/GALLO IMAGES

As Robbie Wessels said all those years ago, daar's 'n lelike ding wat kopwys (there's an ugly thing rearing its head)in our rugby.

It's not the rugby itself, though we all know what hard viewing that has been. Rather it's the advent of a phenomenon in injury circles called the torn biceps.

As a weakling who has never actually seen his, I struggle to fathom how one can actually tear a biceps muscle.

But Pierre Spies, Dewald Potgieter, Flip van der Merwe and even wittle Pat Lambie have, at some stage or other, found out the hard way this season.

Spies, Potgieter and Lambie are still out injured, while Van der Merwe seems to have made a miraculous recovery from his, only to undo all of that by getting suspended this week for exercising said biceps by punching Paddy Ryan's nose at the weekend.

The injury isn't new to Bulls No8 Spies, given that he spent most of last season out after suffering it before hurting the same muscle this year.

With the bodybuilder-cum-rugby-player, it's understandable how a muscle can come off the bone - he is so muscular that rugby hacks have almost felt obliged to talk about him and his muscles as separate entities.

Potgieter should be a less-than-obvious candidate (he did say the good news was that he discovered he had biceps, but the bad news was that he was out of the game for a while), but his playing style lends itself to suffering strange injuries.

The Bulls flanker - who sports Tom Cruise's look from the film The Last Samurai since coming back from Japan - has always looked the part of a man trying to commit seppuku by kamikaze rugby.

Wee Lambie's scenario is a mystery for a couple of reasons. At 1.77m and 87kg, he's not a big fella, and the biceps injury appears to be a big man's injury.

The Sharks' flyhalf is also not a Bulls player like the others mentioned in this article, which goes some way towards allaying fears that they spend more time exercising their biceps than thinking about rugby at Loftus.

While there's a touch of novelty about the injury, it is not particularly new. Springbok captain Jean de Villiers infamously missed out on most of the 2007 World Cup after having his biceps unhinged during the first game of the tournament.

But there is a hint of designer injury to it now that it has become so prevalent this season. It's a bit like in soccer a few years back, when it appeared the one injury every player simply had to suffer was the broken metatarsal.

While my colleague Carlos Amato memorably dismissed the problem as lying in the modern soccer boots - which he said were made of piranha sperm and little else - it's difficult to explain why the biceps muscle has become an endangered species in rugby.

According to Wiki, the biceps branchii, to use its official name, is the muscle you use to open a bottle with a corkscrew, among other things. I've uncorked many a bottle of wine without lasting discomfort.

So why are rugby players hurting theirs? Is it an overdevelopment thing, or is there something that has changed in how they play the game that puts the muscles at risk?

I always thought the only way you could overdevelop your biceps was if you were part of the Waterkloof Four and were pretending to be doing time in a Pretoria jail, so the plot thickens.

This column prides itself on solving rugby's problems on a regular basis, but I must admit I'm stumped.

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