Welsh rugby hero Gareth Thomas' hidden life began to unravel in 2007 with an admission to his wife, says Eddie Butler.
Since Gareth "Alfie" Thomas is the first international rugby player to come out and say he is gay, there is no protocol to break or to follow.
There was a familiar pattern: the years of torment and the deception, with particular regard to his wife, Jemma, and now the relief.
But no system exists, based on past experience, to help him through his private struggle and his public sporting career.
That might imply that rugby, a bit like the military, refuses to acknowledge homosexuality in its ranks. We don't offer help because there is no problem to solve.
Or it suggests that, for all its promotion of itself as the territory of the alpha male, rugby is surprisingly grown up in its inclusiveness. Leading Welsh referee Nigel Owens is gay. Big deal. Alfie is gay. So what?
To expand this idea that we have moved beyond salaciousness, it might have been better if Thomas' sexuality, hardly a secret to anyone in the game, had not been splashed across English and Welsh newspapers.
If rugby knew about it and took it in its stride, it seems there is a still a splash to be made elsewhere by such a revelation. And I suppose the fact that I'm writing about it adds me to the list of the prurient.
He nearly made it. At the age of 35 his best days are behind him. He certainly won't be adding to his 100 caps for Wales or his 41 international tries, which include one for the Lions in 2005.
His secret life began to unravel in France where, while playing with Stade Toulousain, he admitted, in 2007, to Jemma that he was gay.
She returned to Wales, while Thomas went back and forth between the two countries, preparing for the 2007 World Cup that would have Wales playing both at the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff and in Nantes. Thomas was captain, and his team unravelled against Fiji in one of the most memorable - and, for Wales, disastrous - matches of all time.
Wales failed to make the quarter-finals and Thomas' international career was over. If he registered with the new regime of Warren Gatland, it was only as a player to be avoided.
This had absolutely nothing to do with his being gay. The Wales players, when Scott Johnson was in charge the previous season, had been told about his sexuality and had responded with an emphatic: "Don't worry, Alfie. We know."
Johnson had left, replaced by Gareth Jenkins, who departed immediately after the World Cup. Gatland was now in charge.
The New Zealander ordered his squad to stop telling Thomas what was going on. This was because certain classified - only in the rugby sense - information was being leaked, and if Alfie was guilty of one thing it was of being a liability when it came to matters that did not really concern him.
Back in 2005, when Mike Ruddock was coach of the first grand slam side of the decade, Thomas as captain had made it clear that the players sided more with Johnson, whom Ruddock had inherited from Steve Hansen as assistant coach (this was a very confusing time in Welsh rugby).
Thomas thought Ruddock was being given too much credit for the grand slam campaign, the first in 27 years. Ruddock felt increasingly undermined by Johnson.
The growing rift involved accusations of player-power in the camp, a flexing of Thomas' considerable muscles.
He once marched into the offices of the then chief executive officer of the Welsh Rugby Union, Steve Lewis, and informed him that unless halfback Gareth Cooper's medical premiums were sorted out the players would go on strike rather than play against Scotland.
When Alfie was captain, or even insurance broker, life was never dull in the Wales camp. Or in the Lions'.
When he took over from Brian O'Driscoll on the ill-fated tour of 2005 to New Zealand, he provided a dose of humour and courage in a specially arduous test series.
Between 2005, when he broke his thumb and had time on his hands, and 2007, when he returned from France and was warned away from the Welsh camp, Thomas was a larger-than-life character, never anything but courageous and utterly committed on the field and never less than a menace off it.
Was this the time of maximum anguish in his personal life, coinciding with this storm of political involvement?
Since 2007 he has been playing for the Cardiff Blues in almost total silence, under a self-imposed media blackout, drifting, it seemed, towards retirement.
And now this, a return to the headlines.
We should say: "We know, Alfie, we know. Don't worry."
But since it's Gareth Thomas, I suspect that this will all have come out in a giant tumble and he'll want us to be, I don't know, agitated.
Now he should get out there and enjoy the rest of his playing days.
- OBSERVER
