Non Evans
Driving home from the Olympics that was supposed to be her sporting finale, Non Evans MBE started to cry. She was shattered. A career traversing international rugby, judo, wrestling and weightlifting was over, and there was nothing she could do about it. Life was also set to get worse before it got better, and she could enjoy the daffodils once again.
It’s almost impossible to know where to start telling the story of Non Evans. It’s a dizzying tale of multiple sports, epic highs and devastating lows. There are comebacks from injuries that would surely be career-ending for most; there’s the balancing of time between training, playing, work, and the daily necessities of everyday life; there are the impossible decisions in choosing one discipline over another; there’s the constant need to lose/gain kilos in days or even hours; and then there’s the end of her sporting dreams, all at once, and the repercussions that followed. And did we mention the appearance on Gladiators?
A timeline is one route into the story, but even this gets complicated with several narratives colliding and becoming a muddled mess. Let us try, nonetheless.
Fifteen years ago, on a Friday night at Sardis Road in Pontypridd, Non Evans chased through a sweeping kick from her fly-half Naomi Thomas. It was a Six Nations clash between Wales and France and there was little between the two sides. She reached the kick before her opponents and, just as she was about to kick through, the French No.8 arrived.
“She dived for the ball and my leg snapped completely in half,” recalls Non. “I just looked down and saw my leg at a right angle and started screaming, screaming, and screaming.
“It was all filmed by the BBC and I remember watching it back and seeing the French player running off [after seeing it] and then the French No.10 came over – I was friendly with her – and she just looked and went away and then the touch judge, he looks and walks away, and then the ref walks away and I was just left there screaming.”
Such was the severity of the break, it made the news. “There was no ambulance, there was no splint, so they couldn’t move me off the pitch,” she says. “The players went back in the changing room, and the poor physio – I grabbed my leg to try and straighten it and she was just holding it.
“It took 52 minutes for the fast-response team and over an hour for the ambulance,” she continues, “they eventually put me in a splint, gave me morphine and took me away, then they carried on with the game and Wales beat France that night [11-10]. It was the first time we’d done it, and I was in the hospital.”
The worst was still to come. “In hospital, they grab hold of your leg and straighten it to get it in line and I was screaming the place down,” she says. “After a couple of days, they sent me home and Mark [Perego, Non’s then-husband and former Scarlets and Wales flanker] was with me and my leg was still just clunking around inside the plaster, so I had to go back to see the consultant.”
With a ‘rattling’ leg unlikely to heal anytime soon, she opted for an external fixator – usually reserved, she says for ‘horrific motorbike accidents’ – which meant the pins keeping the leg in place would be nailed into the bones. “I had that done and every few weeks I’d go back for an x-ray but there was no callous formation because they’d put the fixator on too tight,” she says. “In order to get callous formation, you need a bit of movement, but after four months with nails the size of a pen in the bone, it hadn’t worked, so I then had another operation and another fixator, this one adjustable, for three and half months. Then it was healed, but my quad and calf had disappeared.
“First of all, I had a limp, and they said I’d never run again, never play again,” she continues, “Every day I walked up [the 300m] Garth Hill just to try to build my quads, I had a sprint coach, who got me doing loads of fast feet and bouncing and I got some orthotics fitted because my gait had changed and I just trained and trained.
“I still did weights every day, people in the gym thought I was crazy. But I got back and, ironically, my first game back was France away [in February 2007].”
Non’s career, which doesn’t just cover rugby, but also elite-level judo, wrestling, weightlifting and powerlifting, is peppered with similar stories, if not quite as gruesome, always in a vein that suggests you’re unlikely to meet many people quite as driven to succeed as the former Wales full-back. “I was born with the umbilical cord wrapped around my neck four times and my mother said I haven’t stopped moving since,” she says.
It started with judo, aged eleven. Well, football, if we’re starting right at the beginning. “I was a real tomboy,” she says, “my older sister has blonde hair, blue eyes, slim, not competitive at all, but I used to be in shorts and a vest all the time, always driven by sport: football, football, football.
“And not just sport, my job as well,” she says, jumping a few years, “I wanted to be the best sales rep too. I’ve always pushed myself, put myself under pressure, like with the goal-kicking for Wales. We used to lose games by one or two points because no one could kick in the team, so I just kicked and kicked, and we did win games because of it. I wasn’t brilliant but at least we had someone who could kick a bit.”
With judo, Non was always committed. “When I was about fourteen, I was given my first diet sheet,” she says, “I feel like I’ve been on a diet my whole life.
“I left home when I was sixteen and moved to Cardiff, doing my judo, and I boarded,” continues Non.
Studying at what is now Cardiff Met, she found success while still in her teenage years, winning silver at both the 1992 and 1996 Commonwealth Judo Championships, aged 18 and 22. “I was a bit disappointed not to get a gold,” she says.
In the same year as she won the second of her silver medals, she also made her debut for Wales at rugby, a sport she’d only been introduced to four years before.
Not content with the two sports, she’d also added a third while still in her teens. “When I was eighteen, I started weightlifting,” she says, “and when I was 21, I won the World Youth Powerlifting Championship. I did bench press, deadlift and squat and I won it on a 120kg deadlift in the under-58kgs weight category.”
But Non was always looking to the ultimate level in everything she did. “Powerlifting isn’t in the Olympics or Commonwealth Games,” she explains, “so I changed then to weightlifting which is clean and jerk, and snatch, and became Welsh Champion, got silver in the British Championships and qualified for the Manchester Commonwealth Games.”
Now at four sports, she also added TV’s Gladiators to her CV. Managing to get chosen from 26,000 applicants, she appeared on the ITV show in 1997. “It was massive just to get on it,” she recalls. “It’s all filmed in two weeks and you ache in places you’ve never ached before.
“I was quite physical and I gave Vogue a black eye in Powerball, I was fighting with Siren on the Pyramid and I was against a girl called Audrey Garland, I’ll never forget her name,” she says, hinting at the rivalry. “I had a five-second head start and I kept my lead and, just before the travelator, there’s two see-saws. You have to keep your foot behind the yellow mark so you don’t jump off it too early.
“But as I was going on to the second see-saw, [referee] John Anderson called me back and said I’d missed the mark.
“I knew I’d touched it, to this day,” she insists, “and as I got called back, Audrey catches up, goes past me and wins. She won the whole series – and I’d been beating her easily.
“Funnily enough, Jeremy Guscott interviewed me,” she continues, finishing the story, “and normally everyone thanks their families – there are thousands of people in the arena – and I said ‘I want to see a replay’, I had a hell of a strop on.”
As she goes on to explain how the TV replays failed to prove her guilt, Non admits, laughing, “No, I’ve still not got over it, but it was a brilliant experience.”
Non was part of an era of Welsh players that played in England to get the most competitive rugby, with nearby Clifton the destination. “There was a load of Welsh girls that went up and played in the English Premiership,” she says. “It was a big commitment going over to Clifton for training either once or twice a week and then every week you’d be playing against the likes of Saracens, Wasps, Worcester, Richmond – the travelling we did was just crazy, but it was worth it.
“When I first started playing club rugby in Wales there were only eight clubs but the standard was quite good. I used to score loads of tries and didn’t feel I was getting much out of it; playing in the English league really prepared me for international rugby.
“I remember one international match looking in the programme and there wasn’t one player in the starting fifteen that played in Wales,” she continues, “I think one season they said ‘if you’re not going to play your club rugby in Wales, you can’t play for Wales’. So, we all left Clifton and went to play for Tylerstown in the Rhondda and we just hammered everybody. In the end they just said ‘you can go back’.”
That crop of players would also form the nucleus of the team that would record a famous win in 2009. “We had a few thumpings over the years, but we beat England for the first time ever in 22 years, at Taff’s Well,” she says. “It was 15-13 to England with no time left on the clock and we were attacking, we got into their 22 and we got given a penalty. There was no time for a scrum, no time to go for a lineout, so it was either tap-and-go or go for posts, last kick of the game.
“Melissa [Berry] said, ‘can you take it?’ It wasn’t a particularly difficult kick, it was on the 22 just to the right of the posts, but I’d missed a few that night and it was what the kick meant – beating the old enemy for the first time ever.
“So I took it and thankfully it went over,” explains Non. “I didn’t hear the final whistle because all the girls jumped on me, we won 16-15.
“It was absolutely unbelievable. It was Valentine’s Day and the girls had tickets then to go to the men’s game afterwards but there weren’t enough tickets for everybody, so I just went home.
“It was such an anti-climax, the girls got changed to go and watch the men’s game, there was no drinking or anything as we were playing again the following weekend and I remember sitting in my flat with a cup of tea and a Cadbury’s Creme Egg watching the men’s game on TV. It was a great victory though.”
Throughout every anecdote from Non’s career, you have to remind yourself that this wasn’t the only sport going on: there were always at least two elite activities being balanced, not to mention a job to pay the bills, which switched from teaching to television to radio and then sales. “I went to radio for a while as a sports producer, but then I became a medical rep, which is what I do now: driving around a lot in the car, going to see doctors.”
Her routine has always been, basically, insane. “I had a rugby club right next to my flat in Cardiff and there was also a weights shed,” she says. “I’d get up in the morning, put my bobble hat on, and either do my running session on the pitch, my kicking practice or my weights. I’d go to work and then, after work, I’d be training either judo, wrestling, doing my weights or rugby training in the evening.
“Then I had to do my computer work in the evenings as well, so my life was just packed from the minute I got up to the minute I went to bed. At the weekend it was either judo training or wrestling training, rugby training, matches or competitions.”
Sometimes they clashed, sometimes two sports happened to take place in the same city, such as the 2002 Commonwealth Games. “I missed one World Cup in 2002 because it clashed with the Commonwealth Games [in Manchester],” she explains. “The coach said to me that if I didn’t commit fully to every single rugby session, then I wouldn’t get selected for the World Cup so I chose to go to the Commonwealth Games.
“In Manchester I competed in both weightlifting and judo, but it was a bit much,” continues Non. “I dieted for my judo and I weighed in at 56.3kgs on the Wednesday, then I competed, didn’t win a medal, and, the following day, I was weightlifting and I was competing at under 63kgs and I weighed in at 62.5kgs. So, overnight, I’d put on something like ten pounds; that was hard going but it was brilliant.”
Roughly four years were then spent focused on rugby, before she again added wrestling to her roster. But even then, during the sabbatical, one version of rugby wasn’t enough. As she continued to amass her 87 caps and a record-breaking points-tally for Wales at fifteens, she also starred on the international scene at sevens and even played touch rugby. “I loved sevens,” she says, “it suited me: more space, I was agile, I could step and I got to play with girls from different nations. I’m gutted as it’s now in the Commonwealth Games, it could have been my fourth sport.”
In 2010, the Rugby World Cup was in England, starting in late August, while the Commonwealth Games in Delhi began in October, and this time she was allowed to compete at both events. Again, for Non, the challenge came in the diet. “I was always really lean,” she says, “but you need a bit of something on you to take the hits and I was then dieting for my other sports, so it was hard.
“They were weighing us at the Rugby World Cup every day to check we weren’t dehydrated, but then I was also weighing myself in my room to keep my weight down for wrestling. I was in the under-55kgs in Delhi, and my bodyfat was four per cent – I had veins in my abs.
“When I got to Delhi I was 58kgs but had to get to 55kgs because I was hoping to qualify for the 2012 Olympics and they’d only put on four weight categories for women and 59kgs wasn’t one of them, it was either 55 or 63, and 63 was too heavy for me, so I went down to 55.
“It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” she says, “I was in my sweatsuit with my tracksuit on trying to jog around trying to sweat myself down. I made it to 54.5 kilos.”
Of course she did.
Relationships are also hard, even if your partner is like-minded. Non met Mark [Perego] when she was organising Rupert Moon’s testimonial, and needed him to play in the game. “I started chatting to him, then training with him and we started going out and ended up getting married,” she says. “We got married in St Lucia, we didn’t tell anybody, I didn’t change my name or anything like that.
“We trained a lot together,” she says of their time together, “he was always known for his fitness, always the fittest on the team, and he really helped with my fitness and my weights, but he couldn’t understand why I did so much. He’d say, ‘you don’t get any publicity for it, any credit for it, you don’t get paid for it, you get really bad injuries, you get people shouting at you, you’re upset a lot of the time’.
“He used to get a bit frustrated, you know,” recalls Non. “He wanted me to move down west to the Gower but everything I did was in Cardiff: my job, my sport, everything, so it just fizzled out.”
Non scored 64 tries in her international career, a record for the women’s game and matched by David Campese in the men’s, topped only by Bryan Habana (67) and Japan’s Daisuke Ohata (69). She stopped scoring and playing in 2010. “After the World Cup I had a couple of niggly injuries,” she says. “I’d also just done the Commonwealth Games, I was 38 and I thought, ‘what do I do now?’. I wasn’t enjoying rugby and my best friend Claire Flowers was playing a regional game and totally broke her ankle – it was facing the other way – and I just thought I’m 38 now, doing my wrestling, do I really want to risk getting injured again? So, I decided to announce my retirement.”
Wrestling was going to plan. She’d managed to beat some of the top wrestlers going into the British Open in Manchester. “I was getting better,” she says. “It was the semi-final and I was winning the fight and as I picked up this girl and threw her, I just felt this massive ping and my hamstring completely detached from the bone.
“It was something like 10cm detached,” continues Non, “I carried on with the fight to the final whistle to win, I was in absolute agony.
“Then, in order to get my silver medal in the final, I had to step onto the mat and fall over.
“I could’ve beaten the girl I was fighting in the final but obviously couldn’t because I was on one leg.”
To compound matters, she then had to drive all the way back to south Wales from Manchester with a snapped hamstring. “I had a scan the next day, they had to cut me underneath my bum and reattach my hamstring,” she explains.
Compounding matters was the reason behind the injury. “I was dieting and I had a big meeting with my pharmaceutical company in Heathrow,” she says. “We were there a few days, and I had to get to Manchester from Heathrow that night for the weigh in, so I’d asked work if I could leave early and they said ‘no’.
“I left the meeting mid-afternoon and knew I had a couple of kilos to lose and I knew I wouldn’t get to Manchester in time to run my weight off, so I naughtily put my sweatsuit on, hat, gloves, about five layers of clothing, got into the car, put the heated seats on, all the heaters, and blasted it all as I drove, sweating the whole way.
“I had my weighing scales with me, so I stopped in the service station just outside Manchester, stripped off, wiped myself down, weighed myself in the toilets and I was under my weight as I’d had nothing to eat or drink. I made my weight and then the following day I was fighting.
“I’m not surprised I snapped my hamstring because I was completely dehydrated, and driving in the seated position.”
Suddenly, everything sporting was over, and even if the competitive side of her was sated by her work, Non struggled with the transition. “I’ve always worked hard as a medical rep,” she says. “I used to win the top prizes and the trips and you get good bonuses if you do well.
“What I found the most difficult was because my day had been so full and every day I’d had my goals – I had my training and every weekend I had something to look forward to, rugby matches, competitions, sevens, there was always something in my diary to look forward to – then suddenly, overnight, it stops.
“I was training for the sake of training, I was asking myself ‘what am I doing in the gym before work?’ I had a bad hamstring, I couldn’t run properly, I wasn’t involved with the squad. Your relationship with your friends changes because they’re playing and you’re not spending so much time with them because you’re not part of the group.
“I felt isolated, so it was the toughest few years of my life, it left a huge void, you hear of it with male players.
“I approached the Welsh Rugby Union, saying ‘I’ve been involved with Welsh women’s rugby for over fifteen years, I’m probably one of the most high-profile players for Wales, I’ve got world record tries, 87 caps blah blah blah, do you want to use me to do something with the squad? Maybe motivate youngsters?’ I never heard anything back. I played all those years and suddenly it’s gone.”
The accolades still rolled in. “I was the first woman into the rugby hall of fame in London, I was put in the Welsh roll of honour, the first woman rugby player to get an MBE, I was made a bard in the Eisteddfod – me and Nigel Owens on the same day. All these accolades were coming in when I was feeling really strange about life. Looking back now, obviously it’s wonderful, but it didn’t feel like it then.”
She still went to the Olympics in 2012, albeit in a different role. “I wanted to be a part of it, and got a job commentating on the wrestling and weightlifting so at least I was there.
“I spent too much time on my own, that was the biggest problem,” she says, explaining the build-up of emotional problems. “I’d split up with Mark, I’d had to watch the girls going here and there, and then commentating on the Olympics... I was so shattered.
“I didn’t go to the closing ceremony,” she says, “I was so tired, I remember driving home and I just burst into tears, it was relief that I’d done it, but I wasn’t competing anymore.”
Problems built up and, even though she’d never touched a drop of alcohol during her competing days – she was known more for avoiding the social side to rest up for the next event, match or competition – she started drinking. “When I played rugby, I didn’t drink but then I found myself wanting to lose myself,” she says. “I wasn’t able to sleep and I was crying, depressed and anxious and I went to the doctor to give me tablets.
“I found myself drinking more and more and, in the end, I had to stop. It wasn’t as if I wanted a drink, it was making me feel better, that was really, really tough.
“People who had known me over the years couldn’t believe what had happened to me because I was always the boring one, driving. When there was a party at the end of the Six Nations and everyone was having a drink, I had a pint of squash and a cup of tea.
“I’d put weight on, I wasn’t speaking to people, I’d isolate myself, I wasn’t socialising,” continues Non. “If I did go out, I’d embarrass myself, people would tell me things I’d done that I couldn’t remember.
“It all just came to a head, and I went for support, counselling, group sessions, and talked about my feelings. I talked about missing sport, missing friends, and the huge void in your life and they help you think about things differently.
“I changed my job; I went back to medical repping and things have come together again.”
Non’s achievements, coupled with the size of Wales, meant any incidents that happened during her drinking, were soon known to the wider world. “If I’d been Joe Bloggs, no one would have batted an eyelid,” she says, “but if I do it, everybody knows about it.
“It’s on the front page of all the Welsh papers and you get people outside your flat taking photos of you, people saying things about you that get blown out of proportion.
“Sometimes it’s not as bad as people say it is but, because you’re in the public eye, they say one thing and it gets turned into an article.
“Especially in Wales,” she adds, “you live in a bit of a bubble and sometimes I think I wish I was anonymous and could start a life where people didn’t know anything about me, but it is hard in Wales because wherever you go it’s, ‘hi Non’, and you have to be this bubbly person and pretend you’re okay.
“I am okay now,” she says, “but when I wasn’t okay, people don’t really know what to say to you.
“I isolated myself from family and friends because it’s really embarrassing.
I was embarrassed about things but I hope now that I can help other people who are retiring with the void. It’s not just sports, other people go through it with jobs.”
Non’s parents were there for her, but, she says, only one person makes the decision. “I had my parents on my back saying ‘you need to go to a clinic’,” she explains, “I did go to a clinic, but in the end nobody else can push you to get better.
“I went to a local place in Swansea, I’d go every week, group sessions, one-to-one counselling, acupuncture, relaxation – I’ve always found it hard to relax, I’ve always been a high tempo, anxious person, even doing my sport, I’ve never slept that well, so they had to use relaxation techniques, more in tune with the way you feel.
“I have become a lot more chilled.”
What Non has done in sport is genuinely remarkable. She’s achieved more in four sports than most of us could ever dream of getting close to in one, and it’s down to her drive, dedication and, ultimately, an addictive personality, which was also responsible for the problems that happened after leaving the world of sport. “I’ve always had a bit of an addictive personality,” she says, “I’ve been addicted to training, to having perfect braided hair, to doing my make-up, to having a nice tan, to having a six pack, to having good calf muscles, to being the best at work, to losing myself in training,” she says.
“I lost myself in my job and, suddenly, I lost myself in something else. So, sometimes, it must be something to do with your personality,” concludes Non.
We’re talking in the living room of her friend Alan, where she’s staying as her own flat is renovated. In the area of the Gower she now lives, her gym companions tend to be a bit older these days and that’s brought a refreshing outlook on life for Non. “I’ve had to change my mindset,” she explains. “As you get older you mellow a bit as well and I spend quite a lot of time speaking to people from the older generation, like Alan, and you realise you’ve got your life ahead of you.
“I’ve had to sit down and contemplate a lot,” continues Non. “I travelled a lot when I was doing my sport but you never really see anywhere, so one thing I’ve enjoyed is travelling and seeing places rather than seeing a judo mat or a rugby pitch.
“I’ve done some cruising, I’ve done some lectures on the ships, so it’s good having something to look forward to.
“As soon as this [the Covid-19 pandemic] is all over I’ll be looking forward to going away again,” she says. “And not being as obsessed with training either. I still go for a run most mornings when I’m on holiday and on the cruise ships you’ve got big gyms, so I still go to the gym and like to keep myself fit, but if I have to miss two days of training I don’t have to obsess about it. I’m not going to die from two days off.”
After some bumpy times, Non seems in a good place. “I went through a bad phase and then was okay and then I went through a bad phase again,” explains Non. “I’d stopped [drinking] but hadn’t really dealt with the underlying issues and how I felt as a person, so I went through a bad patch again.
“It’s not just the drinking,” she says, “it’s what causes it. I always found it hard to talk about my feelings. I’m not really an open person, people always see me and I’m always the bubbly personality, but everyone has issues.”
As well as her day-time job, training and travelling, Non is also back enjoying [watching] rugby. “I always used to get really excited at this time of year,” she says. “I’d go away most Christmas holidays training to a warm weather place, and then the Six Nations starts, the weather’s getting better, the daffodils are out, spring is in the air – but when I retired it was strange, it was tough watching the girls play and not being involved.
“As the years have gone on, I’ve got used to it, and this year it’s been nice to have something to look forward to, so last weekend was brilliant, two games on the Saturday, Welsh game Sunday.”
She’s enjoying it even more now she’s ‘come through the other side’ of her problems. “If I’d have carried on the way I was I might have died I think,” she admits. “So I’m glad that part of my life is gone and I’m back healthy and happy again.”
And so are the sporting worlds of judo, rugby, wrestling, weightlifting and powerlifting, not to mention Gladiators, where Non made her mark. Not that you’d ever rule out a comeback from Non, especially if Audrey Garland came calling.
Story by Alex Mead
Pictures by Paul John Roberts
This extract was taken from issue 13 of Rugby.
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