Ryan Jones, the former Wales captain and the British and Irish lion, is the latest ex-professional rugby player to reveal he is suffering from incipient dementia.
In an emotional interview with The Sunday Times, the 41-year-old admitted that his current predicament “fears” him and believes the sport is “running with eyes closed in a catastrophic situation”.
Charley, Jones’s partner, described talking to him as “like a conversation with my 85-year-old grandfather”.
Jones retired in 2015 at the age of 34 after a playing career spanning 17 years. He represented Wales 75 times and played in all three Tests on the 2005 Lions tour of New Zealand. In 2008, after leading his country to a Six Nations Grand Slam, the back tower was nominated for the World Player of the Year award.
“I feel like my world is collapsing” Jones told The Sunday Times in a poignant testimony. “And I’m really scared. Because I have three children and three stepchildren and I want to be a wonderful father.
“I’ve lived 15 years of my life as a superhero and I’m not. I don’t know what the future will bring. I am a product of an environment that revolves around process and human performance. I can’t perform like I could. And I just want to live a happy, healthy and normal life.
“I feel like that’s gone down and there’s nothing I can do. I can’t train harder, I can’t play the referee, I don’t know what the rules are anymore.”
Jones, a former Welsh Rugby Union board member and director of community rugby and performance director before stepping down in 2020, was diagnosed last December and joins a growing number of ex-players to expose similar health concerns to bring.
Alix Popham, a contemporary of Jones with Wales, did so in December 2020 around the same time that England’s World Cup-winning hooker Steve Thompson stated that he had early dementia and suspected chronic traumatic encephalopathy.
“We don’t know where to go, where to find support,” added Jones, who is unsure whether his own son, 12-year-old Jacob, wants to continue playing rugby.
‘We have no friends here. It scares me because I don’t know if in two years we’ll be here and these episodes are a week long, two weeks or permanent. That’s the fear, that’s the part that never goes away. That’s the little bit I can’t shake.”