Hooper’s mattress and Olympic “golden dreams”.

The already legendary former Wallabies captain Michael Hooper, as is well known, at the end of last year decided to say goodbye to XV rugby to move to Seven, to cherish the dream of participating in the 2024 Olympics in Paris.

A non-trivial change for the 32-year-old, due to his identity card and previous injuries, but which was starting to give its satisfaction. First in April he made his debut with the Australian national rugby sevens team in Hong Kong, then in early May his first goal arrived during the first day of competition in Singapore, the penultimate stage of the SVNS circuit.

Read also: Video, Michael Hooper’s first try in Sevens

Just when everything seemed to be heading on the right path, however, the body took its toll. A few weeks ago Hooper had to stop, revealing that he suffers from osteitis pubis; trouble that he risks casting doubt on his participation in the upcoming Olympics.

Hooper’s mattress and Olympic “golden dreams”.

The player who wore the Wallabies shirt more than 120 times was told to rest to have a better chance of being called up to the Australian rugby sevens team. Yet the advice, as stated by Hooper himself on the program Between Two Posts by Stan Sport, was not bringing the hoped-for improvements. In particular, the pain became unbearable when he slept at night.

“I’m in pain, I constantly wake up at 2 or 3 in the morning. The pain is in the groin region: it’s as if someone had hit you in the testicles. Then I had to lie on my back because I couldn’t get on my side otherwise it kept hurting. But so my back also started to give me problems.”

Michael Hooper started thinking about buying a new mattress to make himself more comfortable. He spoke about it to the physiotherapist, but the latter told him that even with new support “the situation will not change”.

However, the pain didn’t go away, so the former Wallabies captain went back to his initial intuition: “I endured two weeks of this thing. So one morning I had enough and around 3 I bought a new bed that would be shipped to me the same day,” he added.

“And that seems to have solved the problem… it seems to have worked. Now, this definitely also coincided with the fact that I didn’t train for 10 days. So, who knows which of the two solutions had the most influence.”

The nice solution to Hooper’s misadventures didn’t save him some jokes from former teammates: “If you see Michael Hooper trying to pack a mattress in a large piece of luggage, you know he’s been called up for the Olympics”, former Wallabies center Morgan Turinui joked amicably.

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