A popular name in many Rugby coffee shop conversations is former Rugby Australia (RA) CEO, Raelene Castle. Raelene ran RA from 2017-2020. She is now the CEO of Sport New Zealand. Castle was born in Australia but grew up in New Zealand. Both her parents represented New Zealand at international level sport – her father as a Rugby League player and her mother as a Lawn Bowler.
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Some may see Raelene as a catalyst in sport as she is a female leader, but there are also many Rugby fans that hold her accountable for the collapse of Australian Rugby during her tenure. The Wallabies were knocked out of the 2019 Rugby World Cup by their archrivals – England.
One of the decisions that Raelene made during her time with RA was to terminate the contract of Wallaby star player – Israel Folau. In 2019, Folau posted on his Instagram that gay people, among others, were destined for hell.
Rugby Australia deemed the post constituted a high-level breach of Falous’s contract, which led to Folau losing several sponsorship deals. He then took RA to court seeking 10 Million AUD in damages, and he also argued that the posts were done outside the workplace.
A few weeks back, on my YouTube Channel – Sunday Learnings With Ben - I was very fortunate to interview Raelene about her amazing career, and one of the topics that we spoke about was the Folau incident.
This Sunday Learning’s episode, which runs for twelve and half minutes, was streamed on my channel at 12pm today.
You can watch it here:
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Ben Ibrahim is a TV Commentator, Sports & Media Consultant. In his career, he has worked for FIBA, FISU and Foxsports.
He also set-up the Malaysia Valke Rugby Club for the Global Rapid Rugby competition.
You can contact him on his public Facebook page on his Instagram @benibrahim_
