Terry Newton has spoken of his drugs shame for the first time, while insisting that drug use is widespread in the game.
Newton reveals drugs shame in autobiography
Terry Newton has spoken of his drugs shame which could cost him his rugby league career, while insisting that drug use is widespread in the game.
The former Great Britain hooker was handed a two-year ban in February after testing positive for human growth hormone (HGH) last November.
The former Leeds, Wigan and Bradford player hopes to make a comeback to rugby league once his suspension expires in 2012, but is not taking anything for granted.
In an extract from his forthcoming autobiography Coming Clean, published in Sunday's
News of the World, Newton admitted: "I can't believe I allowed myself to be seduced by something that promised me so much, when in the end it's taken so much."
Newton says his drug use began after he left Bradford last July, but he claims he had heard about other players using the substance two years previously.
Undetectable
He added: "From 2007 players were hearing about HGH. All we knew - or thought - was that it was undetectable. At the end of 2007, Great Britain played the Kiwis and there was a player involved who I'd heard was taking HGH and he got away with it.
"I'd heard about a number of players who were on it. Old, young, English, foreign... more and more were turning to it, believing they wouldn't get caught."
The 31-year-old admits the letter from UK Sport informing him of his failed test came as a complete shock, having never feared he would suffer such a fate.
"I'd like to say that I wrestled with the decision, but I didn't," he continued. "My mind was made up. There was no guilt. I'd blanked the severity of what I was doing from my mind.
"It didn't cross my mind that I'd get done for it. I'd last taken a dose of HGH the previous day at 4pm, about 18 or 19 hours ago. Even the most sceptical of warnings about HGH had been that it was out of your system in 20 minutes."
Panic
Recalling the moment when he opened the letter, he said: "I started panicking. It felt like I was drowning. I bent over the kitchen table like I'd been hit in the ribs, trying to take in breaths. It was as if my whole world was collapsing around me."
The pain suffered by his wife Stacey and his parents was the hardest thing for Newton to come to terms with. But he hopes some good can come of his shame in the form of tighter regulations over drugs in his sport.
He is now running a pub with his father while he serves his ban but has not given up hope of one day returning to the sport he loves.
Newton, who has submitted to a programme of random tests during his ban, said: "I was weak and I cheated but I never saw HGH as a drug because it was something that was helping me. (But) what I took was a banned substance, and the more testing rugby league does the better."
