Another Fat Head bites the dust

This week the UK Anti-Doping Agency (UKAD) announced that yet another Welsh rugby player has been banned for taking performance-enhancing substances. This time it was Bargoed Rugby Club's Adam Buttifant (great name: "'Ow's you butti" "Fantastic butt"), a 19-year-old who had been on the Dragons' books as a youngster.

Young Buttifant has foolishly been taking anabolic steroids, presumably to increase his strength, and will now have to live with a two-year ban from the sport.

Of course, this kind of behaviour is cheating but I feel that the self-obsessed, body-conscious youth of Wales are unwitting victims of a whole host of negative circumstances.

Rugby in Wales was formerly played by wiry men who were either steel workers or miners, men as hard as iron and dense as anthracite. Phil Bennett and Gerald Davies more than made up in skill and speed what they lacked in bulk. Today's rugby players, regardless of height, are almost uniformly squat or stocky.

What's more, those disappeared blue collar jobs gave men the chance to prove themselves, physically, day after day, and your team mates down the rugby club would be your team mates at the pit. What have today's young men got by way of comparison? Call centres to work in, atomised social lives and a social and cultural milieu that celebrates vanity, individualism and spurious, ephemeral popularity.

All the same, taking any performance-enhancing substance should fill a sportsman with shame; there are enough examples of ruined lives (Lance Armstrong, Ben Johnson) to indicate that cheating the competition is ultimately cheating yourself too.

What's more upsetting for me is seeing the bulked up morons raising hell in our towns and cities at night. Sure, certain other parts of the UK have their share of "roiders" but the sheer volume of these puffed up, overgrown kids polluting our pubs and clubs in Wales has to be seen to be believed.

We need to educate our youngsters - show them pictures of the damage caused by steroids to abusers' bodies. Shrivelled dicks, tiny balls, enlarged hearts - whatever.

Let's put a stop to these apes with an overblown sense of entitlement and inflated self-worth clogging up our nightlife.

Rant over.