Olympic Leaguers

Sean Fagan of RL1908.com

We all know that merely being a rugby league player was, until the mid-1990s, enough to instantly and permanently see you banned by amateur rugby union as a "professional".

The Olympics were no different.

Any suggestion that rugby league should be an Olympic sport was immediately ruled out as a "professional" sport - never mind that in the 1950s and '60s the game was being played by teams from Italy, Canada, South Africa and the USA.

Not only was the sport banned, but so were the players - even if they wanted to play another sport at the Olympic Games.

Once declared a "professional", the punishment extended across all amateur sports.

While it is arguably a moot point given few "leaguers" pursue another top level sport at the same time as their football days (or after), there are some players who more than dabbled in other sports - notably wrestling, boxing and sprinting.

However, the taint of professionalism was a permanent mark on the forehead of rugby league players, and a rigid barrier against their Olympic aspirations.

Some, such as Michael Cleary in the 1960s (South Sydney and Australia), joined rugby league as an "amateur", in the effort to keep their Commonwealth and Olympic Games dreams alive - Cleary refused to accept any payment from rugby league until his athletic career was over.

In 1962 Cleary, by then a Rabbitoh, entered the Commonwealth Games in Perth, winning a bronze medal in the 100 Yards sprint.

Cleary is the closest any rugby league player (active or retired) has come to appearing at an Olympics. Parramatta's Dick Thornett was a member of Australia's water polo team at the 1960 Rome Olympics, before he joined the Eels in 1963 (and later played for the Kangaroos).

Another group of Olympians connected to rugby league are the members of the 1908/09 Wallabies team who crossed over to the professional game after the tour.

Rugby union was played at the Olympics in 1900 (Paris), 1908 (London), 1920 (Antwerp) and 1924 (Paris). In an era where travelling for team sports was a major impediment to selecting and forming national teams for tours, for the most part the few nations that took part at all, were represented at the Olympics by one of their clubs (sometimes with additional players). There were also very few matches involved in each tournament.

The timing of the 1908 London Olympics coincided with the tour of the Wallabies to Britain, affording Australia with its chance to take part. The only other team to enter were Cornwall, who had won the RFU County Championship earlier in the year. The Wallabies won this one-off match for the gold medal 32-3 at Shepherd's Bush in London.

When the Wallabies returned home to Australia, half the squad switched to rugby league, including eight of the 15 that won the Olympic match: John Hickey, Charles 'Boxer' Russell, Arthur McCabe, Chris McKivat, Charles McMurtrie, John Barnett, Robert Craig and Paddy McCue.

In the late 1920s the Olympics banned professional soccer players, which
triggered the birth of the soccer World Cup. The idea of a "World Cup" for sports, was born from the exclusion of professional team sports from the Olympics.

A World Cup was seen as providing professional soccer players with
their chance to appear on the world stage, denied to them by their
exclusion from the amateur ethos of the Olympics.

The idea for a soccer World Cup was first pushed by France's Jules Rimet, and France hosted the tournament in 1938.

In the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, rugby union was back on the schedule, though this time as a psuedo-demonstration sport. With a distinct pre-WW2 neo-fascist leaning, the only teams to take part were France (at the time banned from the Five Nations for professionalism), Romania, Italy and Germany.

With France taking a prominent role in soccer (World Cup) and rugby union (Olympics), in 1935 officials of the French rugby league proposed that a World Cup of the rugby league playing nations be held.

With WW2 over, and air travel making it a more realistic option to move teams around the world, the first Rugby League World Cup tournament took place in France in 1954.

The stance by the International Olympic Committee against professional sports, denying so-called "professionals" their opportunity to represent their country, led to soccer and rugby league becoming the first two sports to devise and launch their own World Cup.