Beating the drum on drugs in rugby that no-one wants to hear?

Benezech, author of 'Rugby, ou sont tes valeurs?' or 'Rugby, where are your values', found himself sued by many different parties - including the French players' union, Provale - for publicly expressing concern that the sport may be just as entangled in drug abuse now as professional cycling was in the 1990s.

All but one of those parties has failed in their case against him, but on Newstalk last Thursday night when interviewer Ger Gilroy prefaced any question with either of two words, Benezech palpably stiffened. Those words were "doping" and "illegal".

The former France prop believes that ambiguous use of language simply feeds the "defensive reaction" that triggers a circling of wagons in sport.

It also, clearly, encourages that now endlessly discredited audit of measuring the breadth of a problem for any sport by the number of positive tests it has against its name. In rugby's case, admittedly, that number is already worrying.

Perilous

Yet, Benezech's argument is that any culture of casual drug ingestion, even if the products taken are not banned, represents a perilous gamble with players' long-term health.

His story has been taken up in recent weeks by Irish journalist Paul Kimmage, thus putting it on this week's press conference agenda for Leinster and Ireland No 8 Jamie Heaslip.

I'm not entirely sure what we expected of Heaslip in this instance. If he is aware of drug mis-use among his peers, chances are that that knowledge is strictly anecdotal and it is hardly wise to publicly recycle anecdote as fact. If he has never encountered the issue, then there is not much more to ask.

Heaslip, inevitably, talked instead of the countless blood and urine tests today's professionals are subjected to, suggesting that the systems in place were doing their job.

This was a faint echo of the comments Benezech encountered in France from iconic figures like Fabien Galthie and Guy Noves. If rugby had a drug problem, they simply had not seen it.

What rugby does have, undeniably, is an issue of perception. The super-sizing of players means that many of today's backs are the size of yesterday's second-rows. And today's second-rows? Well there that really invites no rational comparison.

This was the thing that troubled Benezech in March of last year when attending a corporate reception in Stade de France after the Top 14 game between Stade Francais and Clermont. The players, he said, were simply "people from a different planet."

His unease pitched him down a road that has been extraordinarily intimidating and, ultimately, sad. Invited to meet members of Provale in Toulouse - in other words the very people he was trying to protect - he encountered an atmosphere of hostility.

But the lawsuits have been failing against him simply because Benezech's arguments are sustained by robust medical concerns.

It isn't what we perceive as doping that he is challenging. It is the concept of "medical assistance" for performance. To that end, Benezech talks of the legal consumption of pain-killers or costicoids to help the "show" be the spectacle that it must.

In Ireland, the IRFU counsels against the supplement culture that, anecdotally again, has long been considered a blight on schools rugby.

Yet how successful that counselling proves is certainly open to debate.

Professional rugby in France responded with indignation to Laurent Benezech's insinuation that it may be dancing down the very same path that led cycling to the Festina affair, but that indignation has been tapering with each new court defeat.

Suddenly, people wonder just what it is they see with the naked eye. A community of freaks, or one artificially created by medicine?

Benezech isn't arguing about cheats (not technically at least), he is arguing about dangerous ignorance. In doing so, he walks an uncomfortable path because his sport does not much like the sound of what he is saying.

"I try to re-create the vocabulary," he said on Thursday night. The shame is that he has to.

Hunt didn't deserve the din of ridicule

You can't but have some sympathy for Stephen Hunt's somewhat innocent stumble into the propellers of GAA indignation this week.

His suggestion that county hurlers and Gaelic footballers "wouldn't know what hit them" if they had to live to the standards of professional footballers raised more hackles than he could have anticipated.

The broad tone of response wasn't simply disproving, it was angry. Stephen, it seemed, suddenly represented the stereotypical football pro, self-absorbed and cosseted. And his admission of driving the 800 metres to training at Reading so that he might 'rest' his body drew upon Hunt a predictable din of ridicule.

The worst of it depicted him as some kind of anti-GAA lout, ignorant to the demands imposed on a modern inter-county player.

Yet, anyone who knows Hunt will tell of a man deeply connected to the GAA, one who represented Waterford in the Tony Forristal Cup as well as at U-16 level.

They will also speak of a hugely open, likeable figure who comes home for Waterford's Championship games in summer.

Perhaps it was a little clumsily articulated, but the basic point of his column last week was simply that life as a professional footballer is not necessarily what it is often painted.

For that, he was roundly pilloried. He didn't deserve to be.

A vote for Stephanie is no novelty gesture

The sheer technical difficulty of Stephanie Roche's extraordinary goal for Peamount United against Wexford Youths made her a YouTube sensation.

But the possibility of her winning the prestigious Puskas Award at next month's FIFA Ballon D'Or Gala may now elevate it to utterly iconic status.

Roche, the first woman to make the final three, is there entirely on merit alongside millionaire superstars Robin Van Persie and James Rodriguez. All three goals are wonderful and any one of them would be a worthy winner.

But you have to hope that the weight of her opponents' celebrity is not a deciding factor.

The gender issue is irrelevant. Anyone who has ever played football will understand just how remarkable Roche's goal was, albeit it was scored in front of a relatively tiny live audience. Roche's strike has since been seen by almost three million people on the internet, and the hope must be that many of those will be sufficiently impressed now to give her their vote.

If they do, it won't be a novelty vote. It will be a simple declaration that she has scored one of the finest goals ever seen.

If you haven't already done so, go on the FIFA website and give Roche your vote, just as you surely would do if it had been scored by Robbie Keane.