🕷️ Crawler Inspector

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Raw Queries and Responses

1. Shard Calculation

Query:

Response:

Calculated Shard: 84 (from laksa054)

2. Crawled Status Check

Query:

curl -X POST \
  'http://laksa084.int.ahrefs:8124/' \
  -H 'Content-Type: text/plain' \
  -H 'X-ClickHouse-Database: crawler3' \
  -H 'Authorization: Basic YXBpOg==' \
  -d 'SELECT getAhrefsURLFromUnparsed(src_unparsed) AS found_url, ifNull(toUnixTimestamp(download_stamp), 0) AS crawl_time, ifNull(toUnixTimestamp(props_url_first_seen), 0) AS first_indexed_time, download_http_code AS http_code, src_unparsed AS src_unparsed, src_root_hash AS src_root_hash, history_drop_reason AS history_drop_reason, meta_title AS meta_title, meta_descriptions AS meta_descriptions, attrs_boilerpipe_text AS attrs_boilerpipe_text, attrs_markdown AS attrs_markdown, attrs_readable_markdown AS attrs_readable_markdown, meta_canonical AS meta_canonical FROM crawler3.page_info_local FINAL PREWHERE (src_root_hash, src_unparsed) IN ((getAhrefsRootHashFromUnparsed(getAhrefsUnparsedNoserviceFromURL(\'https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6595238/2025/09/10/abi-burton-england-womens-rugby-world-cup/\')), getAhrefsUnparsedNoserviceFromURL(\'https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6595238/2025/09/10/abi-burton-england-womens-rugby-world-cup/\'))) FORMAT JSONEachRow'

Response:

{"found_url":"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/athletic\/6595238\/2025\/09\/10\/abi-burton-england-womens-rugby-world-cup\/","crawl_time":1773735488,"first_indexed_time":1757489589,"http_code":200,"src_unparsed":"com,nytimes!www,\/athletic\/6595238\/2025\/09\/10\/abi-burton-england-womens-rugby-world-cup\/ s443","src_root_hash":"4566504020376537684","history_drop_reason":null,"meta_title":"Women’s Rugby World Cup: England’s Abi Burton and the most extraordinary sporting comeback - The Athletic","meta_descriptions":["The Women's Rugby World Cup offers Abi Burton a chance to carve out an identity beyond the illness that swallowed two years of her life"],"attrs_boilerpipe_text":"Abi Burton’s\nWomen’s Rugby World Cup\ndebut completed one of the most extraordinary comebacks in world sport. Three years after spending almost a month in a coma, she took to the field against Samoa and helped England progress to the quarter-finals after a record win.\nFor the 25-year-old England forward, this tournament on home soil is her biggest chance to carve out an identity beyond the illness that swallowed two years of her life.\nIn 2022, she was mistakenly sectioned before being put in a medically induced coma. She woke to find she had missed that summer’s Commonwealth Games. She told nurses of her desire to be at the Rugby Sevens World Cup in a month’s time. The flaw in that plan was that she had lost 19 kilos and couldn’t even walk.\nIt has taken time, and counselling, for Burton to come to terms with the fact that doctors took so long — over a fortnight — to see that the root of it all was not mental health issues but seizures caused by NMDAR antibody encephalitis. It is a rare autoimmune disorder where the body’s immune system wrongly attacks receptors in the brain, leading to inflammation, seizures and the psychiatric symptoms that had been misdiagnosed as depression, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, anxiety and psychosis. The usual cause is ovarian cysts or brain tumours. Burton had neither.\n“I felt like I’d been robbed,” she tells\nThe Athletic\nof the months afterwards when a player who had been a member of the Team GB Olympic rugby sevens squad in Tokyo the previous year realised “in waves” all that she had been denied in her career. “But at the same time, if I live in the past about it, I’ll never get to move forward.”\nAbi Burton interacts with fans as she arrives at Franklin’s Gardens prior to the match with Samoa\nDavid Rogers\/Getty Images\nToday, Burton wears the trauma lightly, moving with a comfort and contentment in her own skin.\nWe meet at Castleford RUFC, where she began her career playing rugby union at her hometown club in Yorkshire. She has been hosting a film crew to tell her story ahead of a tournament that England are runaway favourites to win. Should they do so, it will be a third world title and first since 2014. They entered the World Cup on the back of 25 straight wins and a seventh successive Six Nations title in April and have already comfortably beaten the U.S., Samoa and Australia in the World Cup group stages.\nThe Lionesses’ Euro 2022 win offered a glimpse of the impact a home tournament can have on women’s sport. It brings extraordinary pressures and possibilities for the game’s growth and health.\n“Our coach says all the time, ‘Just be where your feet are’,” she says. Fittingly given the legacy the tournament could leave, Burton arrives late for her interview because she has spent time speaking with a local teenager on pathways through women’s rugby.\nBurton’s ordeal began when she tore her medial collateral ligament in Spain during the World Rugby Sevens Series in January 2020. She returned, rusty but still feeling good, until she began to feel an all-consuming sadness. Her team-mates attributed her mood to the injury; Burton knew that it was deeper, albeit without explanation. “After that, I just kind of… That’s when my life just turned upside down.”\nShe has pieced events together with the aid of her team-mates and parents, her mother Sarah having kept a journal, which Burton has never read, to not only help her own processing of events but to provide a record when they realised Burton would have no memory of most of it.\nDoctors told the Burtons that their daughter’s brain was so inflamed that she couldn’t retain any information. In one hospital, for instance, Burton would ask troubling questions. How did the security guard know her name? Why were there security guards outside the door?\nSarah would explain, only for Burton to forget the next day: the security guard recognised them because Burton had rugby-tackled him a day earlier, and the guards were there because she was a danger to other people.\n“It’s just scary that I went through the period of three or four months where I have no memory,” Burton says, “and I just get told (what happened). I think I’m going to wake up one day and I’m going to remember, but maybe not.”\nShe learned that she had still been playing rugby, and driving, until her first seizure in mid-June. There are no memories of playing at Twickenham for internal games with London Sevens. In pictures of that time, she looks ghostly, vacant, “dead behind the eyes”. A sports psychologist diagnosed her with depression.\nApathy transformed to aggression. She came out of hospital to find the spindles on the staircase snapped. “I’d be like: ‘Mum — why is that banister broken?’ And she’d say: ‘You ripped it off and tried to hit your dad with it’. Slowly, things just started to come out. I tried to hit my dad with a brick. I was just constantly trying to fight him. I punched my mum in the face with a phone in my hand, bust her nose open. Five minutes later, apparently I said: ‘What’s wrong with your nose?’”\nBurton and Helena Rowland embrace after England’s Pool A victory over Samoa\nDavid Rogers\/Getty Images\nShe speaks frankly but a sense of astonishment lingers, in part that her parents remained so stoic amid repeated outbursts.\n“They knew it wasn’t me,” she says. “Afterwards, I felt guilty. I felt guilty that I didn’t remember a thing and they had all these memories. And I had a lot of, like, trauma, but I had no memory to put the trauma to.”\nHow did she feel when they told her of it all? “I was mortified. I might look big and strong, but I’m like a teddy bear. I’m so tame, such an affectionate person.” In the grip of a July heatwave, the ground is silent apart from the hum of traffic on the street behind and the bark of a dog. Burton gazes off in the distance.\nThose incidents were what led medical professionals to conclude that she was having a psychotic breakdown. Among the diagnoses was one of stress-induced psychosis. Burton was sectioned and admitted to Fieldhead Hospital in the nearby town of Wakefield, where her parents could only see her for an hour a day, if at all.\nTwo-and-a-half weeks later, one researcher raised the possibility of NMDAR antibody encephalitis, at which point she was moved to Pinderfields Hospital, also in Wakefield. Her father Danny, an ex-police officer, was the only parent present when doctors suggested placing Burton in a coma so she could receive plasma exchanges. He was the one who consented.\n“If you’re put in a coma in the police, you know you’re not going to wake up,” she says, slowly. “He thought he’d basically killed me. He won’t speak to anybody about it. He hates it. He’s like: ‘Why would I want to relive that?’”\nBurton and team-mate Morwenna Talling pose with the Women’s Six Nations trophy in April this year\nDavid Rogers\/Getty Images\nThe plan had been to wake her up in two days. That became four-and-a-half weeks of plasma exchanges, steroids and chemotherapy. At night, the Burtons slept outside the hospital in their car, sapped by constant terror and adrenaline. “They say every day they just felt so frightened,” she continues. “They just didn’t know what they were dealing with.”\nShe has scattered memories from surfacing from the coma to begin life in the ICU: wrestling with her feeding tube, tending to her teddies — who had their own hospital wristbands so that people would know the ward to return them to if they were lost — playing with one nurse’s wedding ring.\n“In my brain, I thought I was speaking,” she says. Her room was near the delivery suite on the maternity ward and she and Danny would sit in the courtyard, hear babies crying and take turns guessing how recently they’d been born. Coupled with regular ultrasounds on her uterus to rule out ovarian cysts as a cause, Burton’s addled brain concluded that she had just given birth.\nMemories begin to crystallise from her time in the stroke neurology unit. Most prominent are the first time she saw her brothers and the stubbornness with which she relearned to walk. “The first time they tried to take me up the stairs, I fell,” she says.\nLike sportspeople are wont to, she sought to push the boundaries of a conventional recovery. That brought fresh pain for a family for whom it was all still raw.\n“Running, I sounded like I was about to pass out every single time,” she recalls. “I was going blue. Me and my mum had a few carry-ons in my rehab process.”\n“I remember just shouting at her: ‘Leave me alone. I can do this. I need to do this’,” Burton adds.\n“If I hadn’t pushed the boundaries, I probably wouldn’t have got back as quickly. But people hated being around me. You just feel helpless. I couldn’t understand why I couldn’t wash my own hair because my hands couldn’t go above my head. I couldn’t understand why I couldn’t open something because I had tremors like this. You get really frustrated with yourself.”’\nDoctors were divided on whether she could play rugby again, which had been at the forefront of her mind as she regained consciousness.\nBurton’s case is unprecedented. The advice of one specialist was that she “might as well try”, Burton explains. “Because my illness isn’t correlated to anything to do with rugby, I could relapse and I’ll relapse. Same with cancer. If I have another seizure, it might mean that I won’t be able to play again or it might mean that I will just go back on medication for the rest of my life. But we just don’t know. I’m a bit of an anomaly.”\nDid she even entertain the thought of giving up? “No. Nah. There wasn’t one part of me that ever thought I’d have to give it up.” Nonetheless, prior to that meeting with the specialist, she had to mentally prepare herself for life without rugby. “I’ll find something else that I’ll love,” she told herself, and says that she would have retired had they advised her against continuing.\nAfter being discharged in August 2023, she played her first game in March 2025, as part of Hong Kong 10s, a 10-a-side rugby tournament. Britain’s sevens team were out there for their tournament and witnessed her comeback, alongside which she presented them with their GB shirts.\nShe went to the Paris Olympics as a reserve for Team GB before being called into play. “We all just cried all the time, me and my mates,” Burton says. “All you can even think about is how much you’ve missed it and how happy you are that you get to do it again.”\nBurton scores England’s 11th try on her debut at this year’s Six Nations\nDan Mullan\/Getty Images\nTo say that Burton was born to play rugby belies the extent of her own commitment — and that of her parents, who would drive for hours to trial for teams and colleges — but certainly she demonstrated a natural aptitude and was born into the right family.\nHer father Danny played\nrugby league\nfor Bradford Bulls; her twin brothers, Joe and Oli, both play. Burton’s own journey began with sessions for her local club aged five but she, in her own words, “just wanted to cartwheel around the pitch and pick up the daisies”.\nAged 13, she found rugby again, having first tried swimming and gymnastics, via a school game and then Castleford. She was scouted for Yorkshire 10 minutes into her career. “My dad was stood next to John Hardy, the Yorkshire coach, and he said: ‘How long’s your daughter been playing rugby for?’ My dad said 10 minutes. ‘No, not this game. How long has she been playing for?’ My dad was like: ‘She’s been playing rugby union for 10 minutes’.”\nShe moved Gloucester in south-west England to go to college at Hartbury in the hope of playing for England and left her final A-level exam to find a missed call from the England Sevens programme, the offer of a first professional contract and the possibility of an Olympics.\nAt 18, she moved to London and made her World Rugby Sevens Series debut. Appearances at two Olympic Games helped to make her one of the most-capped players in the sevens squad. After last summer’s Olympics, she left the sevens set-up to try for the longer, more traditional version of the game, “full well knowing that I might never play international rugby again” but knowing that she would never be satisfied without reaching a World Cup with England.\nPremiership Women’s Rugby, the English top-flight, is not fully-professional — Burton works as the head coach for Brunel University’s Women’s Programme — but the gamble has been worth it. The Red Roses call came in January this year ahead of her full debut in March.\nAttendances in women’s rugby vary between the two codes but in union “we’ve really started to break through barriers and break through walls”, Burton says. The Red Roses have sold out the 82,000-capacity Twickenham stadium for this month’s final. Burton was at the heaving Stade de France during the Paris Olympics, the tournament that prompted the American businesswoman Michele Kang to announce a $4 million donation to the U.S. women’s rugby sevens team over four years.\nShe hopes those who watch the tournament see a player who will “go until I’m dying on the floor. I’ll never stop for the people around me.”\nThe memory of her ordeal offers useful perspective — “sometimes I’m too hard on myself (when) the reason sometimes I might not pick something up as quickly is because of my head” — but she knows that there was life before her illness, just as there is life after it.\n“It doesn’t define who I am as a player. Like, I don’t want to be known as this miracle that happened. I’m not this fragile, ill person who I was over those two years. I am who I am now. It’s shaped me in a different way, but I’m not just that.”\n(Top photo: Dan Mullan\/Getty Images)","attrs_markdown":"[![](data:image\/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAAAAACw=)Premier League](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/athletic\/football\/premier-league\/)\n\n[![](data:image\/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAAAAACw=)Champions League](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/athletic\/football\/champions-league\/)\n\n[![](data:image\/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAAAAACw=)2026 Men's World Cup](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/athletic\/football\/world-cup\/)\n\n[![](data:image\/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAAAAACw=)F1](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/athletic\/formula-1\/)\n\n[![](data:image\/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAAAAACw=)Tennis](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/athletic\/tennis\/)\n\n[![](data:image\/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAAAAACw=)FA 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Whyatt](https:\/\/theathletic.com\/app\/themes\/athletic\/assets\/img\/AvatarDark.png)](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/athletic\/author\/katie-whyatt\/)\n\nBy\n\n[Katie Whyatt](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/athletic\/author\/katie-whyatt\/)\n\nSept. 10, 2025\n\nShare full article\n\n7\n\nAbi Burton’s [Women’s Rugby World Cup](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/athletic\/6564773\/2025\/08\/27\/sarah-bern-interview-england-womens-rugby-world-cup\/) debut completed one of the most extraordinary comebacks in world sport. Three years after spending almost a month in a coma, she took to the field against Samoa and helped England progress to the quarter-finals after a record win.\n\nFor the 25-year-old England forward, this tournament on home soil is her biggest chance to carve out an identity beyond the illness that swallowed two years of her life.\n\nAdvertisement\n\nIn 2022, she was mistakenly sectioned before being put in a medically induced coma. She woke to find she had missed that summer’s Commonwealth Games. She told nurses of her desire to be at the Rugby Sevens World Cup in a month’s time. The flaw in that plan was that she had lost 19 kilos and couldn’t even walk.\n\nIt has taken time, and counselling, for Burton to come to terms with the fact that doctors took so long — over a fortnight — to see that the root of it all was not mental health issues but seizures caused by NMDAR antibody encephalitis. It is a rare autoimmune disorder where the body’s immune system wrongly attacks receptors in the brain, leading to inflammation, seizures and the psychiatric symptoms that had been misdiagnosed as depression, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, anxiety and psychosis. The usual cause is ovarian cysts or brain tumours. Burton had neither.\n\n“I felt like I’d been robbed,” she tells *The Athletic* of the months afterwards when a player who had been a member of the Team GB Olympic rugby sevens squad in Tokyo the previous year realised “in waves” all that she had been denied in her career. “But at the same time, if I live in the past about it, I’ll never get to move forward.”\n\n![](https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/athletic\/uploads\/wp\/2025\/09\/03160127\/GettyImages-2232858652-scaled.jpg)\n\nAbi Burton interacts with fans as she arrives at Franklin’s Gardens prior to the match with SamoaDavid Rogers\/Getty Images\n\nToday, Burton wears the trauma lightly, moving with a comfort and contentment in her own skin.\n\nWe meet at Castleford RUFC, where she began her career playing rugby union at her hometown club in Yorkshire. She has been hosting a film crew to tell her story ahead of a tournament that England are runaway favourites to win. Should they do so, it will be a third world title and first since 2014. They entered the World Cup on the back of 25 straight wins and a seventh successive Six Nations title in April and have already comfortably beaten the U.S., Samoa and Australia in the World Cup group stages.\n\nAdvertisement\n\nThe Lionesses’ Euro 2022 win offered a glimpse of the impact a home tournament can have on women’s sport. It brings extraordinary pressures and possibilities for the game’s growth and health.\n\n“Our coach says all the time, ‘Just be where your feet are’,” she says. Fittingly given the legacy the tournament could leave, Burton arrives late for her interview because she has spent time speaking with a local teenager on pathways through women’s rugby.\n\nBurton’s ordeal began when she tore her medial collateral ligament in Spain during the World Rugby Sevens Series in January 2020. She returned, rusty but still feeling good, until she began to feel an all-consuming sadness. Her team-mates attributed her mood to the injury; Burton knew that it was deeper, albeit without explanation. “After that, I just kind of… That’s when my life just turned upside down.”\n\nShe has pieced events together with the aid of her team-mates and parents, her mother Sarah having kept a journal, which Burton has never read, to not only help her own processing of events but to provide a record when they realised Burton would have no memory of most of it.\n\nDoctors told the Burtons that their daughter’s brain was so inflamed that she couldn’t retain any information. In one hospital, for instance, Burton would ask troubling questions. How did the security guard know her name? Why were there security guards outside the door?\n\nSarah would explain, only for Burton to forget the next day: the security guard recognised them because Burton had rugby-tackled him a day earlier, and the guards were there because she was a danger to other people.\n\n“It’s just scary that I went through the period of three or four months where I have no memory,” Burton says, “and I just get told (what happened). I think I’m going to wake up one day and I’m going to remember, but maybe not.”\n\n[What You Should Read Next ![Sarah Bern: From hating her body and barely eating to Vogue and modelling for Barbie](https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/athletic\/uploads\/wp\/2025\/08\/25061138\/GettyImages-2231543905-1024x683.jpg?width=400&quality=70) Sarah Bern: From hating her body and barely eating to Vogue and modelling for Barbie Sarah Bern has become the role model she did not have in the years when she needed one the most](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/athletic\/6564773\/2025\/08\/27\/sarah-bern-interview-england-womens-rugby-world-cup\/)\n\nShe learned that she had still been playing rugby, and driving, until her first seizure in mid-June. There are no memories of playing at Twickenham for internal games with London Sevens. In pictures of that time, she looks ghostly, vacant, “dead behind the eyes”. A sports psychologist diagnosed her with depression.\n\nAdvertisement\n\nApathy transformed to aggression. She came out of hospital to find the spindles on the staircase snapped. “I’d be like: ‘Mum — why is that banister broken?’ And she’d say: ‘You ripped it off and tried to hit your dad with it’. Slowly, things just started to come out. I tried to hit my dad with a brick. I was just constantly trying to fight him. I punched my mum in the face with a phone in my hand, bust her nose open. Five minutes later, apparently I said: ‘What’s wrong with your nose?’”\n\n![](https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/athletic\/uploads\/wp\/2025\/09\/03161946\/GettyImages-2232888481-scaled.jpg)\n\nBurton and Helena Rowland embrace after England’s Pool A victory over SamoaDavid Rogers\/Getty Images\n\nShe speaks frankly but a sense of astonishment lingers, in part that her parents remained so stoic amid repeated outbursts.\n\n“They knew it wasn’t me,” she says. “Afterwards, I felt guilty. I felt guilty that I didn’t remember a thing and they had all these memories. And I had a lot of, like, trauma, but I had no memory to put the trauma to.”\n\nHow did she feel when they told her of it all? “I was mortified. I might look big and strong, but I’m like a teddy bear. I’m so tame, such an affectionate person.” In the grip of a July heatwave, the ground is silent apart from the hum of traffic on the street behind and the bark of a dog. Burton gazes off in the distance.\n\nThose incidents were what led medical professionals to conclude that she was having a psychotic breakdown. Among the diagnoses was one of stress-induced psychosis. Burton was sectioned and admitted to Fieldhead Hospital in the nearby town of Wakefield, where her parents could only see her for an hour a day, if at all.\n\nTwo-and-a-half weeks later, one researcher raised the possibility of NMDAR antibody encephalitis, at which point she was moved to Pinderfields Hospital, also in Wakefield. Her father Danny, an ex-police officer, was the only parent present when doctors suggested placing Burton in a coma so she could receive plasma exchanges. He was the one who consented.\n\n“If you’re put in a coma in the police, you know you’re not going to wake up,” she says, slowly. “He thought he’d basically killed me. He won’t speak to anybody about it. He hates it. He’s like: ‘Why would I want to relive that?’”\n\n![](https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/athletic\/uploads\/wp\/2025\/09\/03162537\/GettyImages-2212126190-scaled.jpg)\n\nBurton and team-mate Morwenna Talling pose with the Women’s Six Nations trophy in April this yearDavid Rogers\/Getty Images\n\nThe plan had been to wake her up in two days. That became four-and-a-half weeks of plasma exchanges, steroids and chemotherapy. At night, the Burtons slept outside the hospital in their car, sapped by constant terror and adrenaline. “They say every day they just felt so frightened,” she continues. “They just didn’t know what they were dealing with.”\n\nAdvertisement\n\nShe has scattered memories from surfacing from the coma to begin life in the ICU: wrestling with her feeding tube, tending to her teddies — who had their own hospital wristbands so that people would know the ward to return them to if they were lost — playing with one nurse’s wedding ring.\n\n“In my brain, I thought I was speaking,” she says. Her room was near the delivery suite on the maternity ward and she and Danny would sit in the courtyard, hear babies crying and take turns guessing how recently they’d been born. Coupled with regular ultrasounds on her uterus to rule out ovarian cysts as a cause, Burton’s addled brain concluded that she had just given birth.\n\nMemories begin to crystallise from her time in the stroke neurology unit. Most prominent are the first time she saw her brothers and the stubbornness with which she relearned to walk. “The first time they tried to take me up the stairs, I fell,” she says.\n\nLike sportspeople are wont to, she sought to push the boundaries of a conventional recovery. That brought fresh pain for a family for whom it was all still raw.\n\n“Running, I sounded like I was about to pass out every single time,” she recalls. “I was going blue. Me and my mum had a few carry-ons in my rehab process.”\n\n“I remember just shouting at her: ‘Leave me alone. I can do this. I need to do this’,” Burton adds.\n\n“If I hadn’t pushed the boundaries, I probably wouldn’t have got back as quickly. But people hated being around me. You just feel helpless. I couldn’t understand why I couldn’t wash my own hair because my hands couldn’t go above my head. I couldn’t understand why I couldn’t open something because I had tremors like this. You get really frustrated with yourself.”’\n\nDoctors were divided on whether she could play rugby again, which had been at the forefront of her mind as she regained consciousness.\n\nAdvertisement\n\nBurton’s case is unprecedented. The advice of one specialist was that she “might as well try”, Burton explains. “Because my illness isn’t correlated to anything to do with rugby, I could relapse and I’ll relapse. Same with cancer. If I have another seizure, it might mean that I won’t be able to play again or it might mean that I will just go back on medication for the rest of my life. But we just don’t know. I’m a bit of an anomaly.”\n\n[What You Should Read Next ![Women’s Rugby World Cup: When the USA shocked the rugby world](https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/athletic\/uploads\/wp\/2025\/08\/20054507\/GettyImages-1320123982-scaled.jpg?width=400&quality=70) Women’s Rugby World Cup: When the USA shocked the rugby world The U.S. was not a traditional rugby nation and the squad had barely trained together before the sport's first Women’s World Cup in 1991](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/athletic\/6564358\/2025\/08\/21\/usa-win-1991-womens-rugby-world-cup\/)\n\nDid she even entertain the thought of giving up? “No. Nah. There wasn’t one part of me that ever thought I’d have to give it up.” Nonetheless, prior to that meeting with the specialist, she had to mentally prepare herself for life without rugby. “I’ll find something else that I’ll love,” she told herself, and says that she would have retired had they advised her against continuing.\n\nAfter being discharged in August 2023, she played her first game in March 2025, as part of Hong Kong 10s, a 10-a-side rugby tournament. Britain’s sevens team were out there for their tournament and witnessed her comeback, alongside which she presented them with their GB shirts.\n\nShe went to the Paris Olympics as a reserve for Team GB before being called into play. “We all just cried all the time, me and my mates,” Burton says. “All you can even think about is how much you’ve missed it and how happy you are that you get to do it again.”\n\n![](https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/athletic\/uploads\/wp\/2025\/09\/03164336\/GettyImages-2207517485-scaled.jpg)\n\nBurton scores England’s 11th try on her debut at this year’s Six NationsDan Mullan\/Getty Images\n\nTo say that Burton was born to play rugby belies the extent of her own commitment — and that of her parents, who would drive for hours to trial for teams and colleges — but certainly she demonstrated a natural aptitude and was born into the right family.\n\nHer father Danny played [rugby league](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/athletic\/6158301\/2025\/02\/27\/las-vegas-rugby-league-nrl-wigan-warrington\/) for Bradford Bulls; her twin brothers, Joe and Oli, both play. Burton’s own journey began with sessions for her local club aged five but she, in her own words, “just wanted to cartwheel around the pitch and pick up the daisies”.\n\nAged 13, she found rugby again, having first tried swimming and gymnastics, via a school game and then Castleford. She was scouted for Yorkshire 10 minutes into her career. “My dad was stood next to John Hardy, the Yorkshire coach, and he said: ‘How long’s your daughter been playing rugby for?’ My dad said 10 minutes. ‘No, not this game. How long has she been playing for?’ My dad was like: ‘She’s been playing rugby union for 10 minutes’.”\n\nAdvertisement\n\nShe moved Gloucester in south-west England to go to college at Hartbury in the hope of playing for England and left her final A-level exam to find a missed call from the England Sevens programme, the offer of a first professional contract and the possibility of an Olympics.\n\nAt 18, she moved to London and made her World Rugby Sevens Series debut. Appearances at two Olympic Games helped to make her one of the most-capped players in the sevens squad. After last summer’s Olympics, she left the sevens set-up to try for the longer, more traditional version of the game, “full well knowing that I might never play international rugby again” but knowing that she would never be satisfied without reaching a World Cup with England.\n\nPremiership Women’s Rugby, the English top-flight, is not fully-professional — Burton works as the head coach for Brunel University’s Women’s Programme — but the gamble has been worth it. The Red Roses call came in January this year ahead of her full debut in March.\n\nAttendances in women’s rugby vary between the two codes but in union “we’ve really started to break through barriers and break through walls”, Burton says. The Red Roses have sold out the 82,000-capacity Twickenham stadium for this month’s final. Burton was at the heaving Stade de France during the Paris Olympics, the tournament that prompted the American businesswoman Michele Kang to announce a \\$4 million donation to the U.S. women’s rugby sevens team over four years.\n\nShe hopes those who watch the tournament see a player who will “go until I’m dying on the floor. I’ll never stop for the people around me.”\n\nThe memory of her ordeal offers useful perspective — “sometimes I’m too hard on myself (when) the reason sometimes I might not pick something up as quickly is because of my head” — but she knows that there was life before her illness, just as there is life after it.\n\n“It doesn’t define who I am as a player. Like, I don’t want to be known as this miracle that happened. I’m not this fragile, ill person who I was over those two years. I am who I am now. It’s shaped me in a different way, but I’m not just that.”\n\n(Top photo: Dan Mullan\/Getty Images)\n\n[![](data:image\/svg+xml,%3csvg%20xmlns=%27http:\/\/www.w3.org\/2000\/svg%27%20version=%271.1%27%20width=%2740%27%20height=%2740%27\/%3e)![Katie Whyatt](https:\/\/theathletic.com\/app\/themes\/athletic\/assets\/img\/AvatarDark.png)](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/athletic\/author\/katie-whyatt\/)\n\nBy\n\n[Katie Whyatt](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/athletic\/author\/katie-whyatt\/)\n\nStaff Writer, Women's Football\n\nTagged To:\n\n[Rugby](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/athletic\/tag\/rugby\/)\n\n[women's sports](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/athletic\/tag\/womens-sports\/)\n\n[Global Sports](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/athletic\/global-sports\/)\n\n[Olympics](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/athletic\/olympics\/)\n\nYour Next Read\n\n[American Cordell Tinch wins 110m world gold as Grant Holloway bows out in semis](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/athletic\/6634072\/2025\/09\/16\/cordell-tinch-faith-kipyegon-gold-world-championships\/)\n\n[Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone breaks American 400-meter record at world championships](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/athletic\/6633960\/2025\/09\/16\/sydney-mclaughlin-levrone-400-meter-american-record-world-championships\/)\n\n[Italian skier Matteo Franzoso dies after head injuries caused from training crash](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/athletic\/6633493\/2025\/09\/16\/matteo-franzoso-death-skiing\/)\n\nLatest League Stories\n\n[PSG, AC Milan and Newcastle owners expected to bid for NBA Europe teams](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/athletic\/7123440\/2026\/03\/16\/nba-europe-license-deadline-bids-adam-silver\/)\n\n[Liam Livingstone criticises England setup, claims 'no one cares' about players not in inner circle](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/athletic\/7122706\/2026\/03\/16\/liam-livingstone-england-mccullum-key-ipl\/)\n\n[Will Lindsey Vonn retire after Olympic injury? She's 'not ready to think about it'](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/athletic\/7120457\/2026\/03\/15\/lindsey-vonn-olympics-injury-retirement\/)\n\nLatest headlines\n\n[Chelsea handed suspended transfer ban, £10m fine for breaching PL rules](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/athletic\/7081285\/2026\/03\/16\/chelsea-transfer-ban-premier-league\/)\n\n[Rudiger accuses Getafe defender of 'exaggerating' '10-game ban' challenge](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/athletic\/7123498\/2026\/03\/16\/antonio-rudiger-diego-rico-challenge\/)\n\n[Arsenal's Odegaard could be available for Carabao Cup final, says Arteta](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/athletic\/7122579\/2026\/03\/16\/martin-odegaard-arsenal-carabao-cup-final\/)\n\n![](data:image\/svg+xml;base64,PHN2ZyB3aWR0aD0iNiIgaGVpZ2h0PSIxMCIgdmlld0JveD0iMCAwIDI0IDI0IiB4bWxucz0iaHR0cDovL3d3dy53My5vcmcvMjAwMC9zdmciPgo8cGF0aCBkPSJNMjQgMS45NTU1OUwxMC41MjQ3IDIxTDAgMTMuMjczTDEuOTYwMzEgMTAuNTUyTDkuNzY2NDggMTYuMjgzMUwyMS4yODc5IDBMMjQgMS45NTU1OVoiIGZpbGw9IiMwMDAwMDAiPjwvcGF0aD4KPC9zdmc+Cg==)\n\n![Connections: Sports Edition Logo](data:image\/png;base64,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)\n\n![Connections: Sports Edition Logo](data:image\/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAASAAAAEgCAMAAAAjXV6yAAAA0lBMVEUAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAD\/\/\/\/v7+\/f39\/Pz8+\/v7+gw1qWt1WWt1SgoKCfn5+Mq0+Mqk+QkJCCn0qCn0mCnkqCnkl4kkSAgIBwcHBkejlkejhabjNabjJgYGBQYi1QYS1QUFBGVidGVShGVSc8SiI8SSJAQEAyPR0yPRwwMDAoMRceJRIeJREeJBEgICAUGQwUGQsUGAsQEBAKDQYKDAYKDAVRd1CXAAAAFXRSTlP\/ABAgMEBQYG9wgI+Qn6CvsL\/P3+959xIgAAAEn0lEQVR42u3c4VYaVxSG4e8wDlRlsHBGTUYb0qaJialoWtE6tRBR7v+WupbaOHuGwYRl4oLzvlcAz9r7\/NsjN6eotZn0fKrVzXe3NpqRm5NcTY048QoknzS\/FSjeTBVUaRJ\/A1DcVYD1WjOB4HnIN78CKOoq4JLoMaCfUgWdb80FaiQKvs1GPVDUw0fyUR1Q5NGxQhZoLcXmLr9WAGJ+ZpRGD0D41G2ZBWrgY+o1SkCbqun6cvhDymU6OVokmcbDx\/o7v1ZNiQVqaWb5x9fZD+pQppfbiyTTMPuK3n7INbP1e6D6B+j6eC8zrQ6QrX88nvlQF4ASVTM8KwhkiVSt+wDUVKV\/3mTZigNZorEqxV+AvMr9uZcFAGT6a\/YIaeYLfZxlwQFlxyoX3wP1qj4hAlWFundAcWW\/sjCBqlsW3wIlso2zUIH2L2Vr3wKlsvWDBcreypY2nFyz8gCFC5QNKjum8oaN+yED7d\/IlDg5Xx6gcIGqI+SdItn6YQPtyxapKVOehQ2U5TK1tCHTh9CBPsrU1pZMv4cO1JcpUVfFbrLQgbIbFevJq1gO0KWKednOATpVsVS2IUAWSAABBBBAAAEEEEAAAQQQQAABBBBAAAEEEEAAAQQQQAABBBBAAAEEEEAAAQRQMEBX+XN1JdPF2SI9xZ+ZchNPREREREREy9X156VOpslokSaa1zBb6mQ62l6kI4AAAggggAACCCCAAAIIIIAAAggggAACCCCAAAIIIIAAAggggAACCCCAAAIIIIAAAggggAACCCCAAAIIIIAAAggggAACCCCAAPquQOfvljqZTl4u0hm370REREREREQrVX64SLmKTV4t0pFMg8PnKpft6b+TP9pepFcyvcueq1OAAAIIIIAAAggggAACCCCAAAIIIIAAAggggAACCCCAAAIIIIAAAggggAACCCCAAAIIIIAAAggggAACCCCAAAIIIIAAAggggAD6rkDTz4s0lRVapEn5hzxXU27fiYiIiIiIaLmanC3SSKZ8qRvL9vTfyb\/KlrpTgAACCCCAAAIIIIAAAggggAACCCCAAAIIIIAAAggggAACCCCAAAIIIIAAAigYoBQg27lsXsUuAMpLPD0VmwB0o2JddWTaDR3oN5l+VlumX0MHOpRpQy2ZzkIHymVqKpJtJ2ygvmyRnJfpIGyggUzeyXVkmuyEDNS\/kilxcrFsByEDDWRrOrlGKtuLcIH6sqXOybm2bBc7wQJdyZbcAsUq9T5UoE8qFd8Cua5KHYQJNFCpnrsDilURChCo6qPWPVB1hPQ+OKC9Tyrn3f9AsSqNdsMCevOvKjW\/ALmuqh3shgO0N1C1xD0ARamqjQzRigFZnqmq+agA5NY1s7NfXqw60Os\/cs2s5YpArlN\/B31y9FgjFbsZLk+XU9XUdhao0eMmvphvlIBc5FExD1AZyEUpLsanDOTWmKH70jVngNiyyvwUgRAq1YtcHZBrtPHpNJwFsrW8gi5ddza5UlFHAdeNXAWoUtMHyxM7VwNka\/XgMUDV4k6qoErbhscA1dTseAWST+KGq0luTlFzY6u7ykyp7yXtVjTP4D\/6awC5wZMmhQAAAABJRU5ErkJggg==)\n\nMar 17, 2026\n\n## Connections: Sports Edition\nSpot the pattern. Connect the terms\n\nFind the hidden link between sports terms\n\nPlay today's puzzle\n\n**[Katie Whyatt](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/athletic\/author\/katie-whyatt\/)** is a UK-based women's football correspondent for The Athletic. She was previously the women's football reporter for The Daily Telegraph, where she was the first full-time women's football reporter on a national paper. Follow Katie on Twitter **[@KatieWhyatt](https:\/\/twitter.com\/KatieWhyatt)**\n\nCOMMENTS\n\n7\n\nK\n\nKatherine A.\n\n· Sep 10, 2025\n\nHi, people in the United States won't know what \"sectioned\" means. Here we would call it involuntary commitment. I had to find another article to figure it out.\n***\n\nJ\n\nJames\\_Donald\n\n· Sep 10, 2025\n\nMy jaw dropped somewhere into the first half of this article and I’m struggling to pick it up again. What an unbelievable story; brilliantly told. In a World Cup over flowing with inspiring stories this one has to top them all.\n***\n\nC\n\nChelsea P.\n\n· Sep 10, 2025\n\nI’ve been loosely following RWC but knew nothing of Burton’s history, so thank you for highlighting and sharing her story\\!\n\nView all comments\n\nNational\n\n[Boxing](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/athletic\/boxing\/)\n\n[Bundesliga](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/athletic\/football\/bundesliga\/)\n\n[Champions League](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/athletic\/football\/champions-league\/)\n\n[Championship](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/athletic\/football\/efl-championship\/)\n\n[College Football](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/athletic\/college-football\/)\n\n[College Sports](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/athletic\/college-sports\/)\n\n[Copa America](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/athletic\/football\/copa-america\/)\n\n[Copa del 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Store](https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/athletic\/logos\/team\/appstore-ios.png?width=256&quality=70&format=auto)](https:\/\/apps.apple.com\/us\/app\/the-athletic-sports-news\/id1135216317)\n\n[![](data:image\/svg+xml,%3csvg%20xmlns=%27http:\/\/www.w3.org\/2000\/svg%27%20version=%271.1%27%20width=%27100%27%20height=%2730%27\/%3e)![Get it on Google Play](https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/athletic\/logos\/team\/appstore-android.png?width=256&quality=70&format=auto) ![Get it on Google Play](https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/athletic\/logos\/team\/appstore-android.png?width=256&quality=70&format=auto)](https:\/\/play.google.com\/store\/apps\/details?id=com.theathletic)","attrs_readable_markdown":"Abi Burton’s [Women’s Rugby World Cup](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/athletic\/6564773\/2025\/08\/27\/sarah-bern-interview-england-womens-rugby-world-cup\/) debut completed one of the most extraordinary comebacks in world sport. Three years after spending almost a month in a coma, she took to the field against Samoa and helped England progress to the quarter-finals after a record win.\n\nFor the 25-year-old England forward, this tournament on home soil is her biggest chance to carve out an identity beyond the illness that swallowed two years of her life.\n\nIn 2022, she was mistakenly sectioned before being put in a medically induced coma. She woke to find she had missed that summer’s Commonwealth Games. She told nurses of her desire to be at the Rugby Sevens World Cup in a month’s time. The flaw in that plan was that she had lost 19 kilos and couldn’t even walk.\n\nIt has taken time, and counselling, for Burton to come to terms with the fact that doctors took so long — over a fortnight — to see that the root of it all was not mental health issues but seizures caused by NMDAR antibody encephalitis. It is a rare autoimmune disorder where the body’s immune system wrongly attacks receptors in the brain, leading to inflammation, seizures and the psychiatric symptoms that had been misdiagnosed as depression, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, anxiety and psychosis. The usual cause is ovarian cysts or brain tumours. Burton had neither.\n\n“I felt like I’d been robbed,” she tells *The Athletic* of the months afterwards when a player who had been a member of the Team GB Olympic rugby sevens squad in Tokyo the previous year realised “in waves” all that she had been denied in her career. “But at the same time, if I live in the past about it, I’ll never get to move forward.”\n\n![](https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/athletic\/uploads\/wp\/2025\/09\/03160127\/GettyImages-2232858652-scaled.jpg)\n\nAbi Burton interacts with fans as she arrives at Franklin’s Gardens prior to the match with SamoaDavid Rogers\/Getty Images\n\nToday, Burton wears the trauma lightly, moving with a comfort and contentment in her own skin.\n\nWe meet at Castleford RUFC, where she began her career playing rugby union at her hometown club in Yorkshire. She has been hosting a film crew to tell her story ahead of a tournament that England are runaway favourites to win. Should they do so, it will be a third world title and first since 2014. They entered the World Cup on the back of 25 straight wins and a seventh successive Six Nations title in April and have already comfortably beaten the U.S., Samoa and Australia in the World Cup group stages.\n\nThe Lionesses’ Euro 2022 win offered a glimpse of the impact a home tournament can have on women’s sport. It brings extraordinary pressures and possibilities for the game’s growth and health.\n\n“Our coach says all the time, ‘Just be where your feet are’,” she says. Fittingly given the legacy the tournament could leave, Burton arrives late for her interview because she has spent time speaking with a local teenager on pathways through women’s rugby.\n\nBurton’s ordeal began when she tore her medial collateral ligament in Spain during the World Rugby Sevens Series in January 2020. She returned, rusty but still feeling good, until she began to feel an all-consuming sadness. Her team-mates attributed her mood to the injury; Burton knew that it was deeper, albeit without explanation. “After that, I just kind of… That’s when my life just turned upside down.”\n\nShe has pieced events together with the aid of her team-mates and parents, her mother Sarah having kept a journal, which Burton has never read, to not only help her own processing of events but to provide a record when they realised Burton would have no memory of most of it.\n\nDoctors told the Burtons that their daughter’s brain was so inflamed that she couldn’t retain any information. In one hospital, for instance, Burton would ask troubling questions. How did the security guard know her name? Why were there security guards outside the door?\n\nSarah would explain, only for Burton to forget the next day: the security guard recognised them because Burton had rugby-tackled him a day earlier, and the guards were there because she was a danger to other people.\n\n“It’s just scary that I went through the period of three or four months where I have no memory,” Burton says, “and I just get told (what happened). I think I’m going to wake up one day and I’m going to remember, but maybe not.”\n\nShe learned that she had still been playing rugby, and driving, until her first seizure in mid-June. There are no memories of playing at Twickenham for internal games with London Sevens. In pictures of that time, she looks ghostly, vacant, “dead behind the eyes”. A sports psychologist diagnosed her with depression.\n\nApathy transformed to aggression. She came out of hospital to find the spindles on the staircase snapped. “I’d be like: ‘Mum — why is that banister broken?’ And she’d say: ‘You ripped it off and tried to hit your dad with it’. Slowly, things just started to come out. I tried to hit my dad with a brick. I was just constantly trying to fight him. I punched my mum in the face with a phone in my hand, bust her nose open. Five minutes later, apparently I said: ‘What’s wrong with your nose?’”\n\n![](https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/athletic\/uploads\/wp\/2025\/09\/03161946\/GettyImages-2232888481-scaled.jpg)\n\nBurton and Helena Rowland embrace after England’s Pool A victory over SamoaDavid Rogers\/Getty Images\n\nShe speaks frankly but a sense of astonishment lingers, in part that her parents remained so stoic amid repeated outbursts.\n\n“They knew it wasn’t me,” she says. “Afterwards, I felt guilty. I felt guilty that I didn’t remember a thing and they had all these memories. And I had a lot of, like, trauma, but I had no memory to put the trauma to.”\n\nHow did she feel when they told her of it all? “I was mortified. I might look big and strong, but I’m like a teddy bear. I’m so tame, such an affectionate person.” In the grip of a July heatwave, the ground is silent apart from the hum of traffic on the street behind and the bark of a dog. Burton gazes off in the distance.\n\nThose incidents were what led medical professionals to conclude that she was having a psychotic breakdown. Among the diagnoses was one of stress-induced psychosis. Burton was sectioned and admitted to Fieldhead Hospital in the nearby town of Wakefield, where her parents could only see her for an hour a day, if at all.\n\nTwo-and-a-half weeks later, one researcher raised the possibility of NMDAR antibody encephalitis, at which point she was moved to Pinderfields Hospital, also in Wakefield. Her father Danny, an ex-police officer, was the only parent present when doctors suggested placing Burton in a coma so she could receive plasma exchanges. He was the one who consented.\n\n“If you’re put in a coma in the police, you know you’re not going to wake up,” she says, slowly. “He thought he’d basically killed me. He won’t speak to anybody about it. He hates it. He’s like: ‘Why would I want to relive that?’”\n\n![](https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/athletic\/uploads\/wp\/2025\/09\/03162537\/GettyImages-2212126190-scaled.jpg)\n\nBurton and team-mate Morwenna Talling pose with the Women’s Six Nations trophy in April this yearDavid Rogers\/Getty Images\n\nThe plan had been to wake her up in two days. That became four-and-a-half weeks of plasma exchanges, steroids and chemotherapy. At night, the Burtons slept outside the hospital in their car, sapped by constant terror and adrenaline. “They say every day they just felt so frightened,” she continues. “They just didn’t know what they were dealing with.”\n\nShe has scattered memories from surfacing from the coma to begin life in the ICU: wrestling with her feeding tube, tending to her teddies — who had their own hospital wristbands so that people would know the ward to return them to if they were lost — playing with one nurse’s wedding ring.\n\n“In my brain, I thought I was speaking,” she says. Her room was near the delivery suite on the maternity ward and she and Danny would sit in the courtyard, hear babies crying and take turns guessing how recently they’d been born. Coupled with regular ultrasounds on her uterus to rule out ovarian cysts as a cause, Burton’s addled brain concluded that she had just given birth.\n\nMemories begin to crystallise from her time in the stroke neurology unit. Most prominent are the first time she saw her brothers and the stubbornness with which she relearned to walk. “The first time they tried to take me up the stairs, I fell,” she says.\n\nLike sportspeople are wont to, she sought to push the boundaries of a conventional recovery. That brought fresh pain for a family for whom it was all still raw.\n\n“Running, I sounded like I was about to pass out every single time,” she recalls. “I was going blue. Me and my mum had a few carry-ons in my rehab process.”\n\n“I remember just shouting at her: ‘Leave me alone. I can do this. I need to do this’,” Burton adds.\n\n“If I hadn’t pushed the boundaries, I probably wouldn’t have got back as quickly. But people hated being around me. You just feel helpless. I couldn’t understand why I couldn’t wash my own hair because my hands couldn’t go above my head. I couldn’t understand why I couldn’t open something because I had tremors like this. You get really frustrated with yourself.”’\n\nDoctors were divided on whether she could play rugby again, which had been at the forefront of her mind as she regained consciousness.\n\nBurton’s case is unprecedented. The advice of one specialist was that she “might as well try”, Burton explains. “Because my illness isn’t correlated to anything to do with rugby, I could relapse and I’ll relapse. Same with cancer. If I have another seizure, it might mean that I won’t be able to play again or it might mean that I will just go back on medication for the rest of my life. But we just don’t know. I’m a bit of an anomaly.”\n\nDid she even entertain the thought of giving up? “No. Nah. There wasn’t one part of me that ever thought I’d have to give it up.” Nonetheless, prior to that meeting with the specialist, she had to mentally prepare herself for life without rugby. “I’ll find something else that I’ll love,” she told herself, and says that she would have retired had they advised her against continuing.\n\nAfter being discharged in August 2023, she played her first game in March 2025, as part of Hong Kong 10s, a 10-a-side rugby tournament. Britain’s sevens team were out there for their tournament and witnessed her comeback, alongside which she presented them with their GB shirts.\n\nShe went to the Paris Olympics as a reserve for Team GB before being called into play. “We all just cried all the time, me and my mates,” Burton says. “All you can even think about is how much you’ve missed it and how happy you are that you get to do it again.”\n\n![](https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/athletic\/uploads\/wp\/2025\/09\/03164336\/GettyImages-2207517485-scaled.jpg)\n\nBurton scores England’s 11th try on her debut at this year’s Six NationsDan Mullan\/Getty Images\n\nTo say that Burton was born to play rugby belies the extent of her own commitment — and that of her parents, who would drive for hours to trial for teams and colleges — but certainly she demonstrated a natural aptitude and was born into the right family.\n\nHer father Danny played [rugby league](https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/athletic\/6158301\/2025\/02\/27\/las-vegas-rugby-league-nrl-wigan-warrington\/) for Bradford Bulls; her twin brothers, Joe and Oli, both play. Burton’s own journey began with sessions for her local club aged five but she, in her own words, “just wanted to cartwheel around the pitch and pick up the daisies”.\n\nAged 13, she found rugby again, having first tried swimming and gymnastics, via a school game and then Castleford. She was scouted for Yorkshire 10 minutes into her career. “My dad was stood next to John Hardy, the Yorkshire coach, and he said: ‘How long’s your daughter been playing rugby for?’ My dad said 10 minutes. ‘No, not this game. How long has she been playing for?’ My dad was like: ‘She’s been playing rugby union for 10 minutes’.”\n\nShe moved Gloucester in south-west England to go to college at Hartbury in the hope of playing for England and left her final A-level exam to find a missed call from the England Sevens programme, the offer of a first professional contract and the possibility of an Olympics.\n\nAt 18, she moved to London and made her World Rugby Sevens Series debut. Appearances at two Olympic Games helped to make her one of the most-capped players in the sevens squad. After last summer’s Olympics, she left the sevens set-up to try for the longer, more traditional version of the game, “full well knowing that I might never play international rugby again” but knowing that she would never be satisfied without reaching a World Cup with England.\n\nPremiership Women’s Rugby, the English top-flight, is not fully-professional — Burton works as the head coach for Brunel University’s Women’s Programme — but the gamble has been worth it. The Red Roses call came in January this year ahead of her full debut in March.\n\nAttendances in women’s rugby vary between the two codes but in union “we’ve really started to break through barriers and break through walls”, Burton says. The Red Roses have sold out the 82,000-capacity Twickenham stadium for this month’s final. Burton was at the heaving Stade de France during the Paris Olympics, the tournament that prompted the American businesswoman Michele Kang to announce a \\$4 million donation to the U.S. women’s rugby sevens team over four years.\n\nShe hopes those who watch the tournament see a player who will “go until I’m dying on the floor. I’ll never stop for the people around me.”\n\nThe memory of her ordeal offers useful perspective — “sometimes I’m too hard on myself (when) the reason sometimes I might not pick something up as quickly is because of my head” — but she knows that there was life before her illness, just as there is life after it.\n\n“It doesn’t define who I am as a player. Like, I don’t want to be known as this miracle that happened. I’m not this fragile, ill person who I was over those two years. I am who I am now. It’s shaped me in a different way, but I’m not just that.”\n\n(Top photo: Dan Mullan\/Getty Images)","meta_canonical":null}

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URL	https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6595238/2025/09/10/abi-burton-england-womens-rugby-world-cup/
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Meta Title	Women’s Rugby World Cup: England’s Abi Burton and the most extraordinary sporting comeback - The Athletic
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Boilerpipe Text	Abi Burton’s Women’s Rugby World Cup debut completed one of the most extraordinary comebacks in world sport. Three years after spending almost a month in a coma, she took to the field against Samoa and helped England progress to the quarter-finals after a record win. For the 25-year-old England forward, this tournament on home soil is her biggest chance to carve out an identity beyond the illness that swallowed two years of her life. In 2022, she was mistakenly sectioned before being put in a medically induced coma. She woke to find she had missed that summer’s Commonwealth Games. She told nurses of her desire to be at the Rugby Sevens World Cup in a month’s time. The flaw in that plan was that she had lost 19 kilos and couldn’t even walk. It has taken time, and counselling, for Burton to come to terms with the fact that doctors took so long — over a fortnight — to see that the root of it all was not mental health issues but seizures caused by NMDAR antibody encephalitis. It is a rare autoimmune disorder where the body’s immune system wrongly attacks receptors in the brain, leading to inflammation, seizures and the psychiatric symptoms that had been misdiagnosed as depression, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, anxiety and psychosis. The usual cause is ovarian cysts or brain tumours. Burton had neither. “I felt like I’d been robbed,” she tells The Athletic of the months afterwards when a player who had been a member of the Team GB Olympic rugby sevens squad in Tokyo the previous year realised “in waves” all that she had been denied in her career. “But at the same time, if I live in the past about it, I’ll never get to move forward.” Abi Burton interacts with fans as she arrives at Franklin’s Gardens prior to the match with Samoa David Rogers/Getty Images Today, Burton wears the trauma lightly, moving with a comfort and contentment in her own skin. We meet at Castleford RUFC, where she began her career playing rugby union at her hometown club in Yorkshire. She has been hosting a film crew to tell her story ahead of a tournament that England are runaway favourites to win. Should they do so, it will be a third world title and first since 2014. They entered the World Cup on the back of 25 straight wins and a seventh successive Six Nations title in April and have already comfortably beaten the U.S., Samoa and Australia in the World Cup group stages. The Lionesses’ Euro 2022 win offered a glimpse of the impact a home tournament can have on women’s sport. It brings extraordinary pressures and possibilities for the game’s growth and health. “Our coach says all the time, ‘Just be where your feet are’,” she says. Fittingly given the legacy the tournament could leave, Burton arrives late for her interview because she has spent time speaking with a local teenager on pathways through women’s rugby. Burton’s ordeal began when she tore her medial collateral ligament in Spain during the World Rugby Sevens Series in January 2020. She returned, rusty but still feeling good, until she began to feel an all-consuming sadness. Her team-mates attributed her mood to the injury; Burton knew that it was deeper, albeit without explanation. “After that, I just kind of… That’s when my life just turned upside down.” She has pieced events together with the aid of her team-mates and parents, her mother Sarah having kept a journal, which Burton has never read, to not only help her own processing of events but to provide a record when they realised Burton would have no memory of most of it. Doctors told the Burtons that their daughter’s brain was so inflamed that she couldn’t retain any information. In one hospital, for instance, Burton would ask troubling questions. How did the security guard know her name? Why were there security guards outside the door? Sarah would explain, only for Burton to forget the next day: the security guard recognised them because Burton had rugby-tackled him a day earlier, and the guards were there because she was a danger to other people. “It’s just scary that I went through the period of three or four months where I have no memory,” Burton says, “and I just get told (what happened). I think I’m going to wake up one day and I’m going to remember, but maybe not.” She learned that she had still been playing rugby, and driving, until her first seizure in mid-June. There are no memories of playing at Twickenham for internal games with London Sevens. In pictures of that time, she looks ghostly, vacant, “dead behind the eyes”. A sports psychologist diagnosed her with depression. Apathy transformed to aggression. She came out of hospital to find the spindles on the staircase snapped. “I’d be like: ‘Mum — why is that banister broken?’ And she’d say: ‘You ripped it off and tried to hit your dad with it’. Slowly, things just started to come out. I tried to hit my dad with a brick. I was just constantly trying to fight him. I punched my mum in the face with a phone in my hand, bust her nose open. Five minutes later, apparently I said: ‘What’s wrong with your nose?’” Burton and Helena Rowland embrace after England’s Pool A victory over Samoa David Rogers/Getty Images She speaks frankly but a sense of astonishment lingers, in part that her parents remained so stoic amid repeated outbursts. “They knew it wasn’t me,” she says. “Afterwards, I felt guilty. I felt guilty that I didn’t remember a thing and they had all these memories. And I had a lot of, like, trauma, but I had no memory to put the trauma to.” How did she feel when they told her of it all? “I was mortified. I might look big and strong, but I’m like a teddy bear. I’m so tame, such an affectionate person.” In the grip of a July heatwave, the ground is silent apart from the hum of traffic on the street behind and the bark of a dog. Burton gazes off in the distance. Those incidents were what led medical professionals to conclude that she was having a psychotic breakdown. Among the diagnoses was one of stress-induced psychosis. Burton was sectioned and admitted to Fieldhead Hospital in the nearby town of Wakefield, where her parents could only see her for an hour a day, if at all. Two-and-a-half weeks later, one researcher raised the possibility of NMDAR antibody encephalitis, at which point she was moved to Pinderfields Hospital, also in Wakefield. Her father Danny, an ex-police officer, was the only parent present when doctors suggested placing Burton in a coma so she could receive plasma exchanges. He was the one who consented. “If you’re put in a coma in the police, you know you’re not going to wake up,” she says, slowly. “He thought he’d basically killed me. He won’t speak to anybody about it. He hates it. He’s like: ‘Why would I want to relive that?’” Burton and team-mate Morwenna Talling pose with the Women’s Six Nations trophy in April this year David Rogers/Getty Images The plan had been to wake her up in two days. That became four-and-a-half weeks of plasma exchanges, steroids and chemotherapy. At night, the Burtons slept outside the hospital in their car, sapped by constant terror and adrenaline. “They say every day they just felt so frightened,” she continues. “They just didn’t know what they were dealing with.” She has scattered memories from surfacing from the coma to begin life in the ICU: wrestling with her feeding tube, tending to her teddies — who had their own hospital wristbands so that people would know the ward to return them to if they were lost — playing with one nurse’s wedding ring. “In my brain, I thought I was speaking,” she says. Her room was near the delivery suite on the maternity ward and she and Danny would sit in the courtyard, hear babies crying and take turns guessing how recently they’d been born. Coupled with regular ultrasounds on her uterus to rule out ovarian cysts as a cause, Burton’s addled brain concluded that she had just given birth. Memories begin to crystallise from her time in the stroke neurology unit. Most prominent are the first time she saw her brothers and the stubbornness with which she relearned to walk. “The first time they tried to take me up the stairs, I fell,” she says. Like sportspeople are wont to, she sought to push the boundaries of a conventional recovery. That brought fresh pain for a family for whom it was all still raw. “Running, I sounded like I was about to pass out every single time,” she recalls. “I was going blue. Me and my mum had a few carry-ons in my rehab process.” “I remember just shouting at her: ‘Leave me alone. I can do this. I need to do this’,” Burton adds. “If I hadn’t pushed the boundaries, I probably wouldn’t have got back as quickly. But people hated being around me. You just feel helpless. I couldn’t understand why I couldn’t wash my own hair because my hands couldn’t go above my head. I couldn’t understand why I couldn’t open something because I had tremors like this. You get really frustrated with yourself.”’ Doctors were divided on whether she could play rugby again, which had been at the forefront of her mind as she regained consciousness. Burton’s case is unprecedented. The advice of one specialist was that she “might as well try”, Burton explains. “Because my illness isn’t correlated to anything to do with rugby, I could relapse and I’ll relapse. Same with cancer. If I have another seizure, it might mean that I won’t be able to play again or it might mean that I will just go back on medication for the rest of my life. But we just don’t know. I’m a bit of an anomaly.” Did she even entertain the thought of giving up? “No. Nah. There wasn’t one part of me that ever thought I’d have to give it up.” Nonetheless, prior to that meeting with the specialist, she had to mentally prepare herself for life without rugby. “I’ll find something else that I’ll love,” she told herself, and says that she would have retired had they advised her against continuing. After being discharged in August 2023, she played her first game in March 2025, as part of Hong Kong 10s, a 10-a-side rugby tournament. Britain’s sevens team were out there for their tournament and witnessed her comeback, alongside which she presented them with their GB shirts. She went to the Paris Olympics as a reserve for Team GB before being called into play. “We all just cried all the time, me and my mates,” Burton says. “All you can even think about is how much you’ve missed it and how happy you are that you get to do it again.” Burton scores England’s 11th try on her debut at this year’s Six Nations Dan Mullan/Getty Images To say that Burton was born to play rugby belies the extent of her own commitment — and that of her parents, who would drive for hours to trial for teams and colleges — but certainly she demonstrated a natural aptitude and was born into the right family. Her father Danny played rugby league for Bradford Bulls; her twin brothers, Joe and Oli, both play. Burton’s own journey began with sessions for her local club aged five but she, in her own words, “just wanted to cartwheel around the pitch and pick up the daisies”. Aged 13, she found rugby again, having first tried swimming and gymnastics, via a school game and then Castleford. She was scouted for Yorkshire 10 minutes into her career. “My dad was stood next to John Hardy, the Yorkshire coach, and he said: ‘How long’s your daughter been playing rugby for?’ My dad said 10 minutes. ‘No, not this game. How long has she been playing for?’ My dad was like: ‘She’s been playing rugby union for 10 minutes’.” She moved Gloucester in south-west England to go to college at Hartbury in the hope of playing for England and left her final A-level exam to find a missed call from the England Sevens programme, the offer of a first professional contract and the possibility of an Olympics. At 18, she moved to London and made her World Rugby Sevens Series debut. Appearances at two Olympic Games helped to make her one of the most-capped players in the sevens squad. After last summer’s Olympics, she left the sevens set-up to try for the longer, more traditional version of the game, “full well knowing that I might never play international rugby again” but knowing that she would never be satisfied without reaching a World Cup with England. Premiership Women’s Rugby, the English top-flight, is not fully-professional — Burton works as the head coach for Brunel University’s Women’s Programme — but the gamble has been worth it. The Red Roses call came in January this year ahead of her full debut in March. Attendances in women’s rugby vary between the two codes but in union “we’ve really started to break through barriers and break through walls”, Burton says. The Red Roses have sold out the 82,000-capacity Twickenham stadium for this month’s final. Burton was at the heaving Stade de France during the Paris Olympics, the tournament that prompted the American businesswoman Michele Kang to announce a $4 million donation to the U.S. women’s rugby sevens team over four years. She hopes those who watch the tournament see a player who will “go until I’m dying on the floor. I’ll never stop for the people around me.” The memory of her ordeal offers useful perspective — “sometimes I’m too hard on myself (when) the reason sometimes I might not pick something up as quickly is because of my head” — but she knows that there was life before her illness, just as there is life after it. “It doesn’t define who I am as a player. Like, I don’t want to be known as this miracle that happened. I’m not this fragile, ill person who I was over those two years. I am who I am now. It’s shaped me in a different way, but I’m not just that.” (Top photo: Dan Mullan/Getty Images)
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Continue F Q\&A # Women’s Rugby World Cup: England’s Abi Burton and the most extraordinary sporting comeback ![](https://static01.nyt.com/athletic/uploads/wp/2025/09/03154153/GettyImages-2232883008-1-1024x683.jpg?width=1920&quality=70&auto=webp) [![](data:image/svg+xml,%3csvg%20xmlns=%27http://www.w3.org/2000/svg%27%20version=%271.1%27%20width=%2740%27%20height=%2740%27/%3e)![Katie Whyatt](https://theathletic.com/app/themes/athletic/assets/img/AvatarDark.png) ![Katie Whyatt](https://theathletic.com/app/themes/athletic/assets/img/AvatarDark.png)](https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/author/katie-whyatt/) By [Katie Whyatt](https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/author/katie-whyatt/) Sept. 10, 2025 Share full article 7 Abi Burton’s [Women’s Rugby World Cup](https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6564773/2025/08/27/sarah-bern-interview-england-womens-rugby-world-cup/) debut completed one of the most extraordinary comebacks in world sport. Three years after spending almost a month in a coma, she took to the field against Samoa and helped England progress to the quarter-finals after a record win. For the 25-year-old England forward, this tournament on home soil is her biggest chance to carve out an identity beyond the illness that swallowed two years of her life. Advertisement In 2022, she was mistakenly sectioned before being put in a medically induced coma. She woke to find she had missed that summer’s Commonwealth Games. She told nurses of her desire to be at the Rugby Sevens World Cup in a month’s time. The flaw in that plan was that she had lost 19 kilos and couldn’t even walk. It has taken time, and counselling, for Burton to come to terms with the fact that doctors took so long — over a fortnight — to see that the root of it all was not mental health issues but seizures caused by NMDAR antibody encephalitis. It is a rare autoimmune disorder where the body’s immune system wrongly attacks receptors in the brain, leading to inflammation, seizures and the psychiatric symptoms that had been misdiagnosed as depression, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, anxiety and psychosis. The usual cause is ovarian cysts or brain tumours. Burton had neither. “I felt like I’d been robbed,” she tells The Athletic of the months afterwards when a player who had been a member of the Team GB Olympic rugby sevens squad in Tokyo the previous year realised “in waves” all that she had been denied in her career. “But at the same time, if I live in the past about it, I’ll never get to move forward.” ![](https://static01.nyt.com/athletic/uploads/wp/2025/09/03160127/GettyImages-2232858652-scaled.jpg) Abi Burton interacts with fans as she arrives at Franklin’s Gardens prior to the match with SamoaDavid Rogers/Getty Images Today, Burton wears the trauma lightly, moving with a comfort and contentment in her own skin. We meet at Castleford RUFC, where she began her career playing rugby union at her hometown club in Yorkshire. She has been hosting a film crew to tell her story ahead of a tournament that England are runaway favourites to win. Should they do so, it will be a third world title and first since 2014. They entered the World Cup on the back of 25 straight wins and a seventh successive Six Nations title in April and have already comfortably beaten the U.S., Samoa and Australia in the World Cup group stages. Advertisement The Lionesses’ Euro 2022 win offered a glimpse of the impact a home tournament can have on women’s sport. It brings extraordinary pressures and possibilities for the game’s growth and health. “Our coach says all the time, ‘Just be where your feet are’,” she says. Fittingly given the legacy the tournament could leave, Burton arrives late for her interview because she has spent time speaking with a local teenager on pathways through women’s rugby. Burton’s ordeal began when she tore her medial collateral ligament in Spain during the World Rugby Sevens Series in January 2020. She returned, rusty but still feeling good, until she began to feel an all-consuming sadness. Her team-mates attributed her mood to the injury; Burton knew that it was deeper, albeit without explanation. “After that, I just kind of… That’s when my life just turned upside down.” She has pieced events together with the aid of her team-mates and parents, her mother Sarah having kept a journal, which Burton has never read, to not only help her own processing of events but to provide a record when they realised Burton would have no memory of most of it. Doctors told the Burtons that their daughter’s brain was so inflamed that she couldn’t retain any information. In one hospital, for instance, Burton would ask troubling questions. How did the security guard know her name? Why were there security guards outside the door? Sarah would explain, only for Burton to forget the next day: the security guard recognised them because Burton had rugby-tackled him a day earlier, and the guards were there because she was a danger to other people. “It’s just scary that I went through the period of three or four months where I have no memory,” Burton says, “and I just get told (what happened). I think I’m going to wake up one day and I’m going to remember, but maybe not.” [What You Should Read Next ![Sarah Bern: From hating her body and barely eating to Vogue and modelling for Barbie](https://static01.nyt.com/athletic/uploads/wp/2025/08/25061138/GettyImages-2231543905-1024x683.jpg?width=400&quality=70) Sarah Bern: From hating her body and barely eating to Vogue and modelling for Barbie Sarah Bern has become the role model she did not have in the years when she needed one the most](https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6564773/2025/08/27/sarah-bern-interview-england-womens-rugby-world-cup/) She learned that she had still been playing rugby, and driving, until her first seizure in mid-June. There are no memories of playing at Twickenham for internal games with London Sevens. In pictures of that time, she looks ghostly, vacant, “dead behind the eyes”. A sports psychologist diagnosed her with depression. Advertisement Apathy transformed to aggression. She came out of hospital to find the spindles on the staircase snapped. “I’d be like: ‘Mum — why is that banister broken?’ And she’d say: ‘You ripped it off and tried to hit your dad with it’. Slowly, things just started to come out. I tried to hit my dad with a brick. I was just constantly trying to fight him. I punched my mum in the face with a phone in my hand, bust her nose open. Five minutes later, apparently I said: ‘What’s wrong with your nose?’” ![](https://static01.nyt.com/athletic/uploads/wp/2025/09/03161946/GettyImages-2232888481-scaled.jpg) Burton and Helena Rowland embrace after England’s Pool A victory over SamoaDavid Rogers/Getty Images She speaks frankly but a sense of astonishment lingers, in part that her parents remained so stoic amid repeated outbursts. “They knew it wasn’t me,” she says. “Afterwards, I felt guilty. I felt guilty that I didn’t remember a thing and they had all these memories. And I had a lot of, like, trauma, but I had no memory to put the trauma to.” How did she feel when they told her of it all? “I was mortified. I might look big and strong, but I’m like a teddy bear. I’m so tame, such an affectionate person.” In the grip of a July heatwave, the ground is silent apart from the hum of traffic on the street behind and the bark of a dog. Burton gazes off in the distance. Those incidents were what led medical professionals to conclude that she was having a psychotic breakdown. Among the diagnoses was one of stress-induced psychosis. Burton was sectioned and admitted to Fieldhead Hospital in the nearby town of Wakefield, where her parents could only see her for an hour a day, if at all. Two-and-a-half weeks later, one researcher raised the possibility of NMDAR antibody encephalitis, at which point she was moved to Pinderfields Hospital, also in Wakefield. Her father Danny, an ex-police officer, was the only parent present when doctors suggested placing Burton in a coma so she could receive plasma exchanges. He was the one who consented. “If you’re put in a coma in the police, you know you’re not going to wake up,” she says, slowly. “He thought he’d basically killed me. He won’t speak to anybody about it. He hates it. He’s like: ‘Why would I want to relive that?’” ![](https://static01.nyt.com/athletic/uploads/wp/2025/09/03162537/GettyImages-2212126190-scaled.jpg) Burton and team-mate Morwenna Talling pose with the Women’s Six Nations trophy in April this yearDavid Rogers/Getty Images The plan had been to wake her up in two days. That became four-and-a-half weeks of plasma exchanges, steroids and chemotherapy. At night, the Burtons slept outside the hospital in their car, sapped by constant terror and adrenaline. “They say every day they just felt so frightened,” she continues. “They just didn’t know what they were dealing with.” Advertisement She has scattered memories from surfacing from the coma to begin life in the ICU: wrestling with her feeding tube, tending to her teddies — who had their own hospital wristbands so that people would know the ward to return them to if they were lost — playing with one nurse’s wedding ring. “In my brain, I thought I was speaking,” she says. Her room was near the delivery suite on the maternity ward and she and Danny would sit in the courtyard, hear babies crying and take turns guessing how recently they’d been born. Coupled with regular ultrasounds on her uterus to rule out ovarian cysts as a cause, Burton’s addled brain concluded that she had just given birth. Memories begin to crystallise from her time in the stroke neurology unit. Most prominent are the first time she saw her brothers and the stubbornness with which she relearned to walk. “The first time they tried to take me up the stairs, I fell,” she says. Like sportspeople are wont to, she sought to push the boundaries of a conventional recovery. That brought fresh pain for a family for whom it was all still raw. “Running, I sounded like I was about to pass out every single time,” she recalls. “I was going blue. Me and my mum had a few carry-ons in my rehab process.” “I remember just shouting at her: ‘Leave me alone. I can do this. I need to do this’,” Burton adds. “If I hadn’t pushed the boundaries, I probably wouldn’t have got back as quickly. But people hated being around me. You just feel helpless. I couldn’t understand why I couldn’t wash my own hair because my hands couldn’t go above my head. I couldn’t understand why I couldn’t open something because I had tremors like this. You get really frustrated with yourself.”’ Doctors were divided on whether she could play rugby again, which had been at the forefront of her mind as she regained consciousness. Advertisement Burton’s case is unprecedented. The advice of one specialist was that she “might as well try”, Burton explains. “Because my illness isn’t correlated to anything to do with rugby, I could relapse and I’ll relapse. Same with cancer. If I have another seizure, it might mean that I won’t be able to play again or it might mean that I will just go back on medication for the rest of my life. But we just don’t know. I’m a bit of an anomaly.” [What You Should Read Next ![Women’s Rugby World Cup: When the USA shocked the rugby world](https://static01.nyt.com/athletic/uploads/wp/2025/08/20054507/GettyImages-1320123982-scaled.jpg?width=400&quality=70) Women’s Rugby World Cup: When the USA shocked the rugby world The U.S. was not a traditional rugby nation and the squad had barely trained together before the sport's first Women’s World Cup in 1991](https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6564358/2025/08/21/usa-win-1991-womens-rugby-world-cup/) Did she even entertain the thought of giving up? “No. Nah. There wasn’t one part of me that ever thought I’d have to give it up.” Nonetheless, prior to that meeting with the specialist, she had to mentally prepare herself for life without rugby. “I’ll find something else that I’ll love,” she told herself, and says that she would have retired had they advised her against continuing. After being discharged in August 2023, she played her first game in March 2025, as part of Hong Kong 10s, a 10-a-side rugby tournament. Britain’s sevens team were out there for their tournament and witnessed her comeback, alongside which she presented them with their GB shirts. She went to the Paris Olympics as a reserve for Team GB before being called into play. “We all just cried all the time, me and my mates,” Burton says. “All you can even think about is how much you’ve missed it and how happy you are that you get to do it again.” ![](https://static01.nyt.com/athletic/uploads/wp/2025/09/03164336/GettyImages-2207517485-scaled.jpg) Burton scores England’s 11th try on her debut at this year’s Six NationsDan Mullan/Getty Images To say that Burton was born to play rugby belies the extent of her own commitment — and that of her parents, who would drive for hours to trial for teams and colleges — but certainly she demonstrated a natural aptitude and was born into the right family. Her father Danny played [rugby league](https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6158301/2025/02/27/las-vegas-rugby-league-nrl-wigan-warrington/) for Bradford Bulls; her twin brothers, Joe and Oli, both play. Burton’s own journey began with sessions for her local club aged five but she, in her own words, “just wanted to cartwheel around the pitch and pick up the daisies”. Aged 13, she found rugby again, having first tried swimming and gymnastics, via a school game and then Castleford. She was scouted for Yorkshire 10 minutes into her career. “My dad was stood next to John Hardy, the Yorkshire coach, and he said: ‘How long’s your daughter been playing rugby for?’ My dad said 10 minutes. ‘No, not this game. How long has she been playing for?’ My dad was like: ‘She’s been playing rugby union for 10 minutes’.” Advertisement She moved Gloucester in south-west England to go to college at Hartbury in the hope of playing for England and left her final A-level exam to find a missed call from the England Sevens programme, the offer of a first professional contract and the possibility of an Olympics. At 18, she moved to London and made her World Rugby Sevens Series debut. Appearances at two Olympic Games helped to make her one of the most-capped players in the sevens squad. After last summer’s Olympics, she left the sevens set-up to try for the longer, more traditional version of the game, “full well knowing that I might never play international rugby again” but knowing that she would never be satisfied without reaching a World Cup with England. Premiership Women’s Rugby, the English top-flight, is not fully-professional — Burton works as the head coach for Brunel University’s Women’s Programme — but the gamble has been worth it. The Red Roses call came in January this year ahead of her full debut in March. Attendances in women’s rugby vary between the two codes but in union “we’ve really started to break through barriers and break through walls”, Burton says. The Red Roses have sold out the 82,000-capacity Twickenham stadium for this month’s final. Burton was at the heaving Stade de France during the Paris Olympics, the tournament that prompted the American businesswoman Michele Kang to announce a \$4 million donation to the U.S. women’s rugby sevens team over four years. She hopes those who watch the tournament see a player who will “go until I’m dying on the floor. I’ll never stop for the people around me.” The memory of her ordeal offers useful perspective — “sometimes I’m too hard on myself (when) the reason sometimes I might not pick something up as quickly is because of my head” — but she knows that there was life before her illness, just as there is life after it. “It doesn’t define who I am as a player. Like, I don’t want to be known as this miracle that happened. I’m not this fragile, ill person who I was over those two years. I am who I am now. It’s shaped me in a different way, but I’m not just that.” (Top photo: Dan Mullan/Getty Images) [![](data:image/svg+xml,%3csvg%20xmlns=%27http://www.w3.org/2000/svg%27%20version=%271.1%27%20width=%2740%27%20height=%2740%27/%3e)![Katie Whyatt](https://theathletic.com/app/themes/athletic/assets/img/AvatarDark.png)](https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/author/katie-whyatt/) By [Katie Whyatt](https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/author/katie-whyatt/) Staff Writer, Women's Football Tagged To: [Rugby](https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/tag/rugby/) [women's sports](https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/tag/womens-sports/) [Global Sports](https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/global-sports/) [Olympics](https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/olympics/) Your Next Read [American Cordell Tinch wins 110m world gold as Grant Holloway bows out in semis](https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6634072/2025/09/16/cordell-tinch-faith-kipyegon-gold-world-championships/) [Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone breaks American 400-meter record at world championships](https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6633960/2025/09/16/sydney-mclaughlin-levrone-400-meter-american-record-world-championships/) [Italian skier Matteo Franzoso dies after head injuries caused from training crash](https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6633493/2025/09/16/matteo-franzoso-death-skiing/) Latest League Stories [PSG, AC Milan and Newcastle owners expected to bid for NBA Europe teams](https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/7123440/2026/03/16/nba-europe-license-deadline-bids-adam-silver/) [Liam Livingstone criticises England setup, claims 'no one cares' about players not in inner circle](https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/7122706/2026/03/16/liam-livingstone-england-mccullum-key-ipl/) [Will Lindsey Vonn retire after Olympic injury? 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Mar 17, 2026 ## Connections: Sports Edition Spot the pattern. Connect the terms Find the hidden link between sports terms Play today's puzzle [Katie Whyatt](https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/author/katie-whyatt/) is a UK-based women's football correspondent for The Athletic. She was previously the women's football reporter for The Daily Telegraph, where she was the first full-time women's football reporter on a national paper. Follow Katie on Twitter [@KatieWhyatt](https://twitter.com/KatieWhyatt) COMMENTS 7 K Katherine A. · Sep 10, 2025 Hi, people in the United States won't know what "sectioned" means. Here we would call it involuntary commitment. I had to find another article to figure it out. * J James\_Donald · Sep 10, 2025 My jaw dropped somewhere into the first half of this article and I’m struggling to pick it up again. What an unbelievable story; brilliantly told. In a World Cup over flowing with inspiring stories this one has to top them all. * C Chelsea P. · Sep 10, 2025 I’ve been loosely following RWC but knew nothing of Burton’s history, so thank you for highlighting and sharing her story\! 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Readable Markdown	Abi Burton’s [Women’s Rugby World Cup](https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6564773/2025/08/27/sarah-bern-interview-england-womens-rugby-world-cup/) debut completed one of the most extraordinary comebacks in world sport. Three years after spending almost a month in a coma, she took to the field against Samoa and helped England progress to the quarter-finals after a record win. For the 25-year-old England forward, this tournament on home soil is her biggest chance to carve out an identity beyond the illness that swallowed two years of her life. In 2022, she was mistakenly sectioned before being put in a medically induced coma. She woke to find she had missed that summer’s Commonwealth Games. She told nurses of her desire to be at the Rugby Sevens World Cup in a month’s time. The flaw in that plan was that she had lost 19 kilos and couldn’t even walk. It has taken time, and counselling, for Burton to come to terms with the fact that doctors took so long — over a fortnight — to see that the root of it all was not mental health issues but seizures caused by NMDAR antibody encephalitis. It is a rare autoimmune disorder where the body’s immune system wrongly attacks receptors in the brain, leading to inflammation, seizures and the psychiatric symptoms that had been misdiagnosed as depression, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, anxiety and psychosis. The usual cause is ovarian cysts or brain tumours. Burton had neither. “I felt like I’d been robbed,” she tells The Athletic of the months afterwards when a player who had been a member of the Team GB Olympic rugby sevens squad in Tokyo the previous year realised “in waves” all that she had been denied in her career. “But at the same time, if I live in the past about it, I’ll never get to move forward.” ![](https://static01.nyt.com/athletic/uploads/wp/2025/09/03160127/GettyImages-2232858652-scaled.jpg) Abi Burton interacts with fans as she arrives at Franklin’s Gardens prior to the match with SamoaDavid Rogers/Getty Images Today, Burton wears the trauma lightly, moving with a comfort and contentment in her own skin. We meet at Castleford RUFC, where she began her career playing rugby union at her hometown club in Yorkshire. She has been hosting a film crew to tell her story ahead of a tournament that England are runaway favourites to win. Should they do so, it will be a third world title and first since 2014. They entered the World Cup on the back of 25 straight wins and a seventh successive Six Nations title in April and have already comfortably beaten the U.S., Samoa and Australia in the World Cup group stages. The Lionesses’ Euro 2022 win offered a glimpse of the impact a home tournament can have on women’s sport. It brings extraordinary pressures and possibilities for the game’s growth and health. “Our coach says all the time, ‘Just be where your feet are’,” she says. Fittingly given the legacy the tournament could leave, Burton arrives late for her interview because she has spent time speaking with a local teenager on pathways through women’s rugby. Burton’s ordeal began when she tore her medial collateral ligament in Spain during the World Rugby Sevens Series in January 2020. She returned, rusty but still feeling good, until she began to feel an all-consuming sadness. Her team-mates attributed her mood to the injury; Burton knew that it was deeper, albeit without explanation. “After that, I just kind of… That’s when my life just turned upside down.” She has pieced events together with the aid of her team-mates and parents, her mother Sarah having kept a journal, which Burton has never read, to not only help her own processing of events but to provide a record when they realised Burton would have no memory of most of it. Doctors told the Burtons that their daughter’s brain was so inflamed that she couldn’t retain any information. In one hospital, for instance, Burton would ask troubling questions. How did the security guard know her name? Why were there security guards outside the door? Sarah would explain, only for Burton to forget the next day: the security guard recognised them because Burton had rugby-tackled him a day earlier, and the guards were there because she was a danger to other people. “It’s just scary that I went through the period of three or four months where I have no memory,” Burton says, “and I just get told (what happened). I think I’m going to wake up one day and I’m going to remember, but maybe not.” She learned that she had still been playing rugby, and driving, until her first seizure in mid-June. There are no memories of playing at Twickenham for internal games with London Sevens. In pictures of that time, she looks ghostly, vacant, “dead behind the eyes”. A sports psychologist diagnosed her with depression. Apathy transformed to aggression. She came out of hospital to find the spindles on the staircase snapped. “I’d be like: ‘Mum — why is that banister broken?’ And she’d say: ‘You ripped it off and tried to hit your dad with it’. Slowly, things just started to come out. I tried to hit my dad with a brick. I was just constantly trying to fight him. I punched my mum in the face with a phone in my hand, bust her nose open. Five minutes later, apparently I said: ‘What’s wrong with your nose?’” ![](https://static01.nyt.com/athletic/uploads/wp/2025/09/03161946/GettyImages-2232888481-scaled.jpg) Burton and Helena Rowland embrace after England’s Pool A victory over SamoaDavid Rogers/Getty Images She speaks frankly but a sense of astonishment lingers, in part that her parents remained so stoic amid repeated outbursts. “They knew it wasn’t me,” she says. “Afterwards, I felt guilty. I felt guilty that I didn’t remember a thing and they had all these memories. And I had a lot of, like, trauma, but I had no memory to put the trauma to.” How did she feel when they told her of it all? “I was mortified. I might look big and strong, but I’m like a teddy bear. I’m so tame, such an affectionate person.” In the grip of a July heatwave, the ground is silent apart from the hum of traffic on the street behind and the bark of a dog. Burton gazes off in the distance. Those incidents were what led medical professionals to conclude that she was having a psychotic breakdown. Among the diagnoses was one of stress-induced psychosis. Burton was sectioned and admitted to Fieldhead Hospital in the nearby town of Wakefield, where her parents could only see her for an hour a day, if at all. Two-and-a-half weeks later, one researcher raised the possibility of NMDAR antibody encephalitis, at which point she was moved to Pinderfields Hospital, also in Wakefield. Her father Danny, an ex-police officer, was the only parent present when doctors suggested placing Burton in a coma so she could receive plasma exchanges. He was the one who consented. “If you’re put in a coma in the police, you know you’re not going to wake up,” she says, slowly. “He thought he’d basically killed me. He won’t speak to anybody about it. He hates it. He’s like: ‘Why would I want to relive that?’” ![](https://static01.nyt.com/athletic/uploads/wp/2025/09/03162537/GettyImages-2212126190-scaled.jpg) Burton and team-mate Morwenna Talling pose with the Women’s Six Nations trophy in April this yearDavid Rogers/Getty Images The plan had been to wake her up in two days. That became four-and-a-half weeks of plasma exchanges, steroids and chemotherapy. At night, the Burtons slept outside the hospital in their car, sapped by constant terror and adrenaline. “They say every day they just felt so frightened,” she continues. “They just didn’t know what they were dealing with.” She has scattered memories from surfacing from the coma to begin life in the ICU: wrestling with her feeding tube, tending to her teddies — who had their own hospital wristbands so that people would know the ward to return them to if they were lost — playing with one nurse’s wedding ring. “In my brain, I thought I was speaking,” she says. Her room was near the delivery suite on the maternity ward and she and Danny would sit in the courtyard, hear babies crying and take turns guessing how recently they’d been born. Coupled with regular ultrasounds on her uterus to rule out ovarian cysts as a cause, Burton’s addled brain concluded that she had just given birth. Memories begin to crystallise from her time in the stroke neurology unit. Most prominent are the first time she saw her brothers and the stubbornness with which she relearned to walk. “The first time they tried to take me up the stairs, I fell,” she says. Like sportspeople are wont to, she sought to push the boundaries of a conventional recovery. That brought fresh pain for a family for whom it was all still raw. “Running, I sounded like I was about to pass out every single time,” she recalls. “I was going blue. Me and my mum had a few carry-ons in my rehab process.” “I remember just shouting at her: ‘Leave me alone. I can do this. I need to do this’,” Burton adds. “If I hadn’t pushed the boundaries, I probably wouldn’t have got back as quickly. But people hated being around me. You just feel helpless. I couldn’t understand why I couldn’t wash my own hair because my hands couldn’t go above my head. I couldn’t understand why I couldn’t open something because I had tremors like this. You get really frustrated with yourself.”’ Doctors were divided on whether she could play rugby again, which had been at the forefront of her mind as she regained consciousness. Burton’s case is unprecedented. The advice of one specialist was that she “might as well try”, Burton explains. “Because my illness isn’t correlated to anything to do with rugby, I could relapse and I’ll relapse. Same with cancer. If I have another seizure, it might mean that I won’t be able to play again or it might mean that I will just go back on medication for the rest of my life. But we just don’t know. I’m a bit of an anomaly.” Did she even entertain the thought of giving up? “No. Nah. There wasn’t one part of me that ever thought I’d have to give it up.” Nonetheless, prior to that meeting with the specialist, she had to mentally prepare herself for life without rugby. “I’ll find something else that I’ll love,” she told herself, and says that she would have retired had they advised her against continuing. After being discharged in August 2023, she played her first game in March 2025, as part of Hong Kong 10s, a 10-a-side rugby tournament. Britain’s sevens team were out there for their tournament and witnessed her comeback, alongside which she presented them with their GB shirts. She went to the Paris Olympics as a reserve for Team GB before being called into play. “We all just cried all the time, me and my mates,” Burton says. “All you can even think about is how much you’ve missed it and how happy you are that you get to do it again.” ![](https://static01.nyt.com/athletic/uploads/wp/2025/09/03164336/GettyImages-2207517485-scaled.jpg) Burton scores England’s 11th try on her debut at this year’s Six NationsDan Mullan/Getty Images To say that Burton was born to play rugby belies the extent of her own commitment — and that of her parents, who would drive for hours to trial for teams and colleges — but certainly she demonstrated a natural aptitude and was born into the right family. Her father Danny played [rugby league](https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6158301/2025/02/27/las-vegas-rugby-league-nrl-wigan-warrington/) for Bradford Bulls; her twin brothers, Joe and Oli, both play. Burton’s own journey began with sessions for her local club aged five but she, in her own words, “just wanted to cartwheel around the pitch and pick up the daisies”. Aged 13, she found rugby again, having first tried swimming and gymnastics, via a school game and then Castleford. She was scouted for Yorkshire 10 minutes into her career. “My dad was stood next to John Hardy, the Yorkshire coach, and he said: ‘How long’s your daughter been playing rugby for?’ My dad said 10 minutes. ‘No, not this game. How long has she been playing for?’ My dad was like: ‘She’s been playing rugby union for 10 minutes’.” She moved Gloucester in south-west England to go to college at Hartbury in the hope of playing for England and left her final A-level exam to find a missed call from the England Sevens programme, the offer of a first professional contract and the possibility of an Olympics. At 18, she moved to London and made her World Rugby Sevens Series debut. Appearances at two Olympic Games helped to make her one of the most-capped players in the sevens squad. After last summer’s Olympics, she left the sevens set-up to try for the longer, more traditional version of the game, “full well knowing that I might never play international rugby again” but knowing that she would never be satisfied without reaching a World Cup with England. Premiership Women’s Rugby, the English top-flight, is not fully-professional — Burton works as the head coach for Brunel University’s Women’s Programme — but the gamble has been worth it. The Red Roses call came in January this year ahead of her full debut in March. Attendances in women’s rugby vary between the two codes but in union “we’ve really started to break through barriers and break through walls”, Burton says. The Red Roses have sold out the 82,000-capacity Twickenham stadium for this month’s final. Burton was at the heaving Stade de France during the Paris Olympics, the tournament that prompted the American businesswoman Michele Kang to announce a \$4 million donation to the U.S. women’s rugby sevens team over four years. She hopes those who watch the tournament see a player who will “go until I’m dying on the floor. I’ll never stop for the people around me.” The memory of her ordeal offers useful perspective — “sometimes I’m too hard on myself (when) the reason sometimes I might not pick something up as quickly is because of my head” — but she knows that there was life before her illness, just as there is life after it. “It doesn’t define who I am as a player. Like, I don’t want to be known as this miracle that happened. I’m not this fragile, ill person who I was over those two years. I am who I am now. It’s shaped me in a different way, but I’m not just that.” (Top photo: Dan Mullan/Getty Images)
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