I’ve always looked at Gus Pichot, especially when he was in his hirsute phase a few years back, as something of a Che Guevara figure.
A revolutionary determined to change the world although clearly in Pichot’s case he did his fighting on the rugby pitch and now the committee rooms of World Rugby.
And actually that thought is not so fanciful, Che Guevara was a typical middle class Argentinian rugby player who was training to become a doctor until he decided he could not ignore the world’s inequities any longer and set off on a very different path. At one stage Guevara edited a Buenos Aires-based rugby magazine Tackle, copies of which occasionally appear on ebay.
Pichot, who is standing against Bill Beaumont to become chairman of World Rugby, is naturally suspicious of cliques, cabals and privilege as you would expect after the Pumas had the door slammed in their face for so many years.
Read the opening line of his manifesto: “Women and men, we all fight for and believe in a fair, equal and more inclusive world. Do we? If so it is time to make these dreams a reality for our sport, Rugby.” That could have been written by Guevara himself.
Gus is not an idiot, he knows full well there are many nations and blazers among the Tier 1 nations who don’t remotely share that philosophy. For the majority of that cosy club might is right, everybody and everything has its price, possession nine parts of the law.
Fighting that can make him uncomfortable company but as Guevara once observed: “Revolution is not an apple that falls when ripe. You have to make it fall.”
Gus is shaking the apple tree for all he is worth right now and all power to his elbow for that.
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