Wintle’s Tale

When Matthew Wintle did just that in 1996, you could have been forgiven for thinking he’d reached the apex of his career.

That is, except for one thing: Wintle was already on his way to becoming a doctor by the time of his Wales debut as a 23-year-old. Six years later, his talents in his field of medicine would draw him to San Diego, California, where a booming biotech industry would make it the envy of the world.

During the eleven years he spent in San Diego, Wintle became Global Medical Director of a company called Amylin Pharmaceuticals. “It was a small company and I was asked to establish its Medical capabilities as it grew from 150 people to almost 2000,” he explains. “We did well. We developed four first-in-class drugs for people with diabetes and other metabolic diseases, then got bought out by Bristol-Myers Squibb.” (That buy-out came at a reported $5.3 billion cost, which then saw a further buy-out by AstraZeneca for another eye-watering sum.)

“That’s what I did after rugby,” says Wintle, now 48. “It probably seemed as if I had disappeared off the face of the planet. I bumped into one former Llanelli teammate at a social event after returning to the UK in 2013. He said to me, ‘Wints, I thought you were dead!’ After retiring from the game and leaving the country, I didn’t watch or even think about rugby for the next six years.”

But first, an insight into where that high-achieving spirit was cultivated.

“I come from Kenfig Hill,” says Wintle. “Bridgend is a very competitive environment when it comes to sports. At Cynffig Comp our two teachers were Tudor Bidder and Nigel Lewis. They were both international-level 400m sprinters [Bidder would go on to become High Performance Manager of the Australian Institute of Sport], so we had an athletics-based, big school that always produced a handful of international rugby players at schools or youth level every year.”

Wintle’s elder brother, Richard, had already gone one further in winning a senior Wales cap from the bench against Western Samoa in 1988. The multi-sport mentality at Cynffig opened many doors for his younger brother, whilst also enabling him to choose just one. “At seventeen, I liked basketball a lot, and I liked rugby,” he says. “I captained Wales basketball at U17 and then went to an U19 World Youth Tournament in America. It was there I realised I was rubbish at basketball! Even though I loved it, I started focusing even more on rugby. It became my sport and my cultural vehicle.”

The Welsh Schools set-up at the time was formative for him. Peter Williams, brother of JJ, was forwards coach and the Cardiff RFC chairman John Huw Williams took care of the backs. The pair would oversee one of the greatest achievements by a Welsh age group team in the game’s history, with Wintle a key member, as Welsh Schools completed an unbeaten four-week tour of New Zealand in 1990.

Prior to their departure, Phil Bennett wrote a column in The Sun questioning the wisdom of sending this young group out to NZ in the first place. “He assumed the experience would scar us mentally, that we’d never believe we could beat them later on at senior level,” recalls Wintle. “Welsh rugby was going through a really difficult period, losing to Romania and Western Samoa, and we hadn’t been consistently great in the Five Nations for quite some time.

“Against that backdrop, we went out there with the mindset that we’d rather die than come home as losers. We were a big bunch of 18-year-olds, with guys like Scott Quinnell and Andrew Lewis, we had a real physical steel to us. We won all our games by only five or six points; every match was a war.”

By the time the news arrived back home in Wales that these fine young men had beaten New Zealand Schools at Rugby Park in Christchurch, even the most ardent of non-believers had been won over. “Phil wrote a lovely follow-up in the paper to say how wrong he was,” says Wintle. “Such a humble giant of our game.”

Some of that schools side would go on to claim a Grand Slam the following year with Wales Youth, captained by none other than Wintle. “Our senior international side may have been struggling for the last ten or perhaps twenty years, but we were keen to show that the future wasn’t all doom and gloom.”

In 1992, Wintle was studying at the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel and playing for London Welsh, coached by the legendary John Dawes, when he made the decision to return to Wales. Well, maybe he felt compelled to do so.

Allan Lewis, backs coach for Llanelli and the national side, was concerned that Wintle was falling behind some of the Wales-based players at his age. “He told me I wasn’t developing as fast as people like Neil Boobyer and Wayne Proctor who were playing in this intense cauldron of rugby,” says Wintle. He had offers from Bridgend and Neath, but saw the bigger picture at Stradey Park: a spell in the newly-created U21s in order to prepare for life in senior first-class rugby.

“My time in Llanelli was amazing. We had eleven internationals in the Welsh side, and two internationals for each of the back row position. The club has a philosophy of growing its own talent and was committed to a style of play that is open and attractive, that’s still alive today. They look for athletic ball players. It’s been such a pleasure to see players like Jonathan Davies and Scott Williams develop through that system to become truly world-class.”

On that 1990 Welsh Schools tour, Wintle had witnessed two players just two years older than him, Wallabies Tim Horan and Jason Little, play in the Bledisloe Cup. Their midfield prowess left a lasting impression on him: despite being contemporaries, he realised he needed to be humble and work hard to achieve anything near their level.

The hard work was vindicated on a frigid January day in 1996, the first ever capped match between Wales and Italy. “Getting my cap was an amazing moment,” says Wintle, who had been in and around the Wales squad for two years by then. “I’d been working hard for some time, but it was by chance that it came: Nigel Davies got injured and was unable to play.”

Wintle was one of five new caps selected by coach Kevin Bowring, along with fly-half Arwel Thomas, centre Leigh Davies, prop Andrew Lewis, and his good friend Gwyn Jones. (Wales won 31-26, meaning Wintle has a 100% win ratio.) “That year, even though we didn’t win the Championship, the team did have a new feel. Kevin put out a young cohort that freshened up the side and played some expansive rugby.

“Gwyn had an outstanding year. I will always remember him playing against the talismanic France openside Laurent Cabannes and basically outplaying him.”

He and Jones’s connection ran deeper than rugby, since both were by then studying medicine in Cardiff and – when they could get away with it – turning out for the renowned Medics rugby side. “I played for Llanelli for six years, and two years with Cardiff, so that’s about eight years of contracted professional rugby when technically I wasn’t allowed to play for anyone else,” Wintle reveals. “So Gwyn and I and a few other international players all had these contracts, but we all still played for the Medics!”

Even when he was living Stateside, Wintle made sure to attend the Cardiff Medics reunions whenever possible.

Wintle now lives in Marlow, Buckinghamshire, where he’s within commuting distance of what is dubbed “the UK’s Golden Research Triangle in Technology, Science and Medicine”: Cambridge, London and Oxford. His family includes three boys, the oldest of whom is nine and is showing a keen interest in rugby, playing for the local minis side.

“Since coming back to the UK in 2014, I’ve focused on the technologies driving the Fourth Industrial Revolution,” he explains, referring to the use of ‘smart technology’ in healthcare. “The digital space is very interesting to me because of the positive impact that it is going to have on health and healthcare. This pandemic has caught everybody out, but it shouldn’t have, we were warned by credible sources many years ago.

“What has happened since is that Governments, Businesses and the Third Sector have been dealing with the pandemic but also considering how we prepare for the future, looking at innovative ways to prevent, detect and mitigate the effects of the next pandemic.”

He’s taken the attributes of his rugby life into his impressive career in biotech. As he tells it: “In rugby, you take to the field with an idea of how you want to play the game, but you’ve also got to adapt to what’s in front of you. That rugby mindset is useful and very attractive in business. Go in with a plan, but you’ve got to be able to read what’s happening and change your approach if you see an opportunity coming. There are many other learnings from sport that we haven’t touched on.

“Rugby is a sport where there wasn’t a single day that I wasn’t thinking about it, dreaming about it, working on it. When you’re twelve years old playing touch or kicking a ball you’re learning what you’re doing wrong, celebrating what you’re doing right. You practise, play and practise. If you do all that with a sense of freedom and fun, time just flies by, and you’re learning without even realising it.

“That’s a useful vehicle for life.”