“Don’t cheat your way to the top” – Andy Last opens up on maintaining integrity of the sport in clean sport week

UK Anti-Doping has been pushing their clean sport initiative lately to make sure that young athletes avoid taking banned substances as their careers develop.

The RFL have supported this thoroughly.

As part of this, Castleford Tigers Head Coach and England Assistant Coach Andy Last has spoken about the importance of this on England RL’s Twitter page.

“From a personal point of view, a clean sport is very important. It is vitally important at England and Castleford Tigers and making sure players look after each other nutritionally and making sure they know that the responsibility lies with them with regards to any supplements that they want to take,” Last said.

“For me personally, knowing that you’ve given your absolute best and not cheated your way to the top, I’d hate to be an advocate of a team that has gained an edge unfairly, I think it is really important that you can look in the mirror and know you have given your absolute best to get to where you want to be and winning Championships by doing the right thing.

“As a professional player I think it is vitally important you make sacrifices and you do the right thing and making yourself 100% aware of what you put in your body and knowing what the laws of the game expect of you is really important.

“The harder you work, the better you get. It may take a bit longer but it is worth doing.

“The best athletes in rugby league are the guys who made those sacrifices.

“It is vitally important as it maintains the integrity of the competition and the sport.”