Footy star Jarome Luai is busted trying to cover up his VERY unhealthy post-match drink in bizarre act at press conference
The Wests Tigers playmaker sat down to front media on Sunday after his club escaped with a 21-20 win over a wasteful Gold Coast Titans outfit.
It is common for players to bring a drink into the media conferences after 80 minutes of tough football, and they usually choose water or a sports drink like NRL sponsor Powerade.
However, Luai had a thirst for something a little unhealthier after the win, bringing a can of Coca-Cola with him as he fronted the media scrum.
In hilarious scenes, he used both hands to cover the label while he sipped from the can, in a failed attempt to disguise the brand of the beverage.
'Jarome Luai trying to not so subtly cover a Coke can before taking a sip during the press conference,' an NRL fan page posted with the video.
'Poor post game drink choice,' another posted.
While it is one of the largest drink brands on the planet, few would agree that Coca-Cola is an ideal choice for athletes looking to refuel after a gruelling game.
However, it can have its benefits - even for athletes like Luai.
Advanced Sports Dietitian Taryn Richardson says Coca-Cola can be a useful tool for endurance athletes when used strategically.
On her podcast, she explained it provides quick-access carbohydrates, caffeine and a small amount of sodium during long events.
'It can actually be a performance enhancer,' she said, before adding that it's 'terrible for your teeth' and not recommended outside of training or racing.
Coke contains about 10g of sugar per 100mL, making it sweeter than most sports drinks.
That high sugar content delivers fast-digesting fuel when glycogen stores are depleted.
Its caffeine helps improve alertness and reduce fatigue in late stages of racing. Some athletes also use it as a palate cleanser or psychological reset after hours of taking in sweet gels and fluids.
However, Richardson warned not to rely on it as the only source of fuel.
'Try it in training first,' she said, noting individual responses will vary.
Luai is not the only NRL star who likes a cold can of Coca-Cola on game day.
His former Penrith teammate and best friend Brian To'o is a well-known addict of the fizzy drink, albeit the No Sugar variety.
The Penrith Panthers and NSW Blues star previously revealed he drank nearly 600 cans of Coke No Sugar in just one month in the offseason, claiming he felt no ill effects.
'Coke sponsored Penrith so they sent me 24 boxes of 24 packs... I got them in October and they were finished by November,' he said.
Coca-Cola delivered the massive haul after hearing about his infamous pre-game meal: two breakfast burgers, a bowl of chips with aioli, a cafe latte with two sugars, and six cans of Coke Zero.
To'o said the routine began at age 14 after a strong performance following a similar meal.
'I had it once when I was young and played really well, so I kept doing it,' he said.
Back then, he ate outside the house to keep it secret from his parents.
'Mum and Dad found out after my second NRL game,' he laughed.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Daily Mail
an hour ago
- Daily Mail
Baby joy! Tennis star Sam Stosur welcomes her second child with partner Liz Astling
Sam Stosur has welcomed her second child with partner Liz Astling. The Australian Grand Slam winner, 41, took to Instagram on Wednesday to announce the arrival of her daughter Emmeline Grace. Sam shared a sweet photo of her newborn baby wrapped in a blanket and wrote: 'And beautiful chaos reigns once again. 'Welcome Emmeline Grace. Evie is beyond happy to have a little sister and we are over the moon. We love you so much little Emmy.' Many flocked to the comments to congratulate the couple on their newest addition, with tennis star Maddison Inglis writing: 'So beautiful!!!! Can't wait to meet her.' From A-list scandals and red carpet mishaps to exclusive pictures and viral moments, subscribe to the DailyMail's new showbiz newsletter to stay in the loop. 'Just another gorgeous baby girl for me to love endlessly ! Emmy your Auntie Nae Nae can't wait to meet you!! Sam and Liz, I'm so happy for you both and Evie, you're going to be the best big sis ever! Love you all,' Rennae Stubbs commented. 'Congrats you guys,' Lizette Cabrera said while Alicia Molik added: 'Congrats Sam, Liz and Evie.' Sam, who shares daughter Genevieve with Liz, announced she was expecting her second child back in April. Taking to Instagram, Sam revealed that her family was set to expand with a cute clip. The video showed Sam hurriedly dusting off and setting up a pram and a baby capsule on her back deck. 'Time to dust off the baby gear,' the sports star wrote over the exciting vision. Captioning the clip, Sam confirmed the news revealing that, this time around, it was her turn to carry the precious cargo. 'We're so excited for the new addition to our family,' she wrote. 'It's my turn this time.' Liz gave birth to Genevieve in 2020. The tennis player announced at the time her girlfriend Liz had given birth to a baby girl on June 16, 2020 in a doting post on Instagram. Sam had gushed about her joy at becoming a mother and how the coronavirus pandemic had been a blessing in disguise for her young family. The Australian grand slam winner said motherhood has been 'absolutely amazing'. 'Even the tougher times don't seem that bad when you just look at her little face and you just want to cuddle her and hold her all day long. It's absolutely incredible,' Sam said. But she admitted she was still adjusting to becoming a mum and all the craziness that comes with it. 'It still seems a little bit weird to say she's my daughter, but I'll get used to that. It's absolutely amazing,' she said at the time. As she battled through the learning process and sleepless nights, she said she' felt fortunate to have been blessed with little Evie. Sam is the only Australian woman since the legendary Evonne Goolagong Cawley, more than half a century ago, to claim major titles in singles, doubles and mixed doubles - all forms of the professional game. Her on-court career came to an emotional end in 2023 following a first-round Australian Open mixed doubles loss with Mathew Ebden. She won the Australian Open women's doubles in 2019 with Zhang Shaui, as well as the mixed title at Melbourne Park way back in 2005 with countryman Scott Draper. The 2011 US Open singles champion also claimed grand slam women's doubles titles at the 2006 French Open and at Flushing Meadows in 2005 and 2021 and spent 61 weeks atop the doubles rankings during her career.
The Guardian
3 hours ago
- The Guardian
Miles Franklin 2025: your guide to the shortlist of Australia's biggest literary prize
All dull awards shortlist books that are alike; every important award recognises books that are remarkable in their own way. This is what makes them worth paying attention to, what makes following them fun – and this year's Miles Franklin award shortlist is no exception. All six books hail from different publishers. Each book is markedly different in genre, style and form. The self is an uncertain site in all these books – one where concepts like nationhood, sexuality, class and ethnicity are negotiated. There is a portrait of coming-of-age and Tongan community, a bawdy historical novel told by a self-styled horse thief, and an interlinked short-story cycle that turns on the omens and aftershocks of a serial killing. And three very different novels of ideas playfully reference other texts (as well as themselves) – and draw attention to how they are made. Notably, Fiona McFarlane's Highway 13 is the first work of linked stories to be shortlisted for the prize, which is awarded to 'the novel of the highest literary merit'. But the shortlist is not, curiously enough, diverse in length: none of the entries break 400 pages, though Burruberongal writer Julie Janson's Compassion comes close. 'I was never good at philosophy,' quips Abraham Quin, Chinese Postman's occasional narrator. After being humiliated by his philosophy tutor at university, he learns to see himself in the third person as well as the first, to move 'easily between the two'. This gives us the basic shape of Castro's narrative, which takes the form of a series of ruminations, in either Quin's voice or a close third-person perspective. So: philosophy's out. Quin is also 'through with all that novel-writing'. Despite this protest, Castro's book is best described as a philosophical novel or a novel of ideas. Chinese Postman is largely plotless, though Quin's email correspondence with a Ukrainian woman named Iryna Zarębina gives it a flexible spine. Quin has a penchant for maxims, particularly when their content is scatological. 'Shit', in his telling, is 'a symptom of lowly creation's failure to survive as gods'. It is, for him, a substance 'without hierarchy', in which 'All are equalised'. Reflections of this kind are Quin's way of 'composting' – rather than composing – his thoughts. For those who read for the sheer delight of allusive, tricky, irreverent sentences, Chinese Postman will be the most exciting work on the shortlist. Compassion is the shortlist's only realist historical novel. Set between the years 1836 and 1854, it is a story of maternal reconciliation and paternal reckoning told largely from the point of view of a Darug woman named Duringah, who escapes abuse and traverses Darkinjung and Awabakal country (as well as the country of many other clans and nations) in order to return home. Compassion is a sequel: it continues the dramatised life story of Janson's ancestors from her 2020 novel, Benevolence, which centred on Duringah's (now-estranged) mother, Muraging. In turning to Duringah, who takes up the alias Eleanor James, Compassion flirts with conventions drawn from an array of literary and popular genres, including colonial romance, revisionist history, melodrama and the picaresque. Duringah outwits and eludes colonial authorities with palpable glee. But Compassion has its heartfelt scenes, too. Duringah's arrival at a mission station, where Koori women sing a church hymn, serves as the occasion for a moment of reverence and some of Janson's best writing. Their voices, 'pure like bells', summon memories of 'singing the country with a corroboree'. Yet this memory culminates in a plea for quiet, lest their songs become a 'beacon for vengeful white men'. This tension – between the desire to speak up, and the risks of doing so – lies at the heart of Janson's truth-telling project. Winnie Dunn once remarked in an interview that she considers 'all forms of writing' to be 'autobiographical fiction'. This has clearly informed her work as an editor for the Sweatshop Literacy Movement, as well as her debut novel. Semi-autobiographical writing, as Dirt Poor Islanders well knows, always takes place in productive tension with the right to privacy – of the writer's family and their broader community. The novel's first chapter thinks this through when Dunn's Tongan-Australian avatar, Meadow Reed, locates her family members in the blotches, beauty spots and wrinkles on her grandmother's face. This intimate moment is promptly interrupted by their racist neighbour Shazza, who tells the pair to 'eff off to Fiji'. This suggests Dunn's keen awareness of the risk of telling stories grounded in personal experience before an ignorant, even hostile, audience. Dirt Poor Islanders refuses to be cowed by this risk. Like two of her clear influences, Melissa Lucashenko and Michael Mohammed Ahmad, Dunn responds by doubling down. Meadow unapologetically narrates scenes of cockroach eating and chicken plucking, force feeding and constipation, menstruation and childbirth. 'From nits having sex on my head', thinks Meadow, 'to maggots wriggling in lumps of lard to cockroaches crawling in cereal boxes and cushion crevices, I asked, 'Y'.' Dunn's answer? A sanitised self is barely half an identity – and 'No one could live as half of themselves'. Ghost Cities is an ingeniously structured novel that takes tyranny as its central theme. At its heart are two dictators – an emperor and a director – both prone to issuing capricious edicts to terrorise their hapless subjects. Both come to preside over labyrinthine cities, implied to be millennia apart. The emperor reigns over the Imperial City, the director over a ghost city named Port Man Tou, peopled by ill-paid actors. The cities are opposed, respectively, by Lu Shan Liang and Xiang Lu, whose names resemble their author's. The novel's wacky, erratic plot plays out across alternating chapters through two timelines, their narratives routinely contorted by the whims of their respective dictators. At one point, Xiang Lu mentions he is partway through Vladimir Nabokov's early novel, Invitation to a Beheading. Nabokov's burlesque of tyrannical logic is one of many texts Ghost Cities is in dialogue with. But Ghost Cities most strikingly resembles another Nabokov novel, Pale Fire. Both novels have a long poem at their centre (in loose iambic pentameter); both feature half-comic assassination attempts. They share an ear for the comedy of translation and an eye for the absurd. Ghost Cities both embraces and defies its emperor's directive to abandon 'the pursuit of beauty' for art that favours 'furrowed brows and scholar-like interpretation'. In its zany intertextuality, it displays a level of intellectual ambition rarely found in recent fiction. The 12 stories that make up Highway 13 are all loosely connected to a single man, Paul Biga, the perpetrator of a series of brutal highway murders, whose facts reference (but don't mirror) those of the convicted backpacker murderer Ivan Milat, arrested in 1994. Interestingly, Highway 13 is the only book shortlisted not to make extensive use of first-person narration. The settings range from 1950 to 2028, and span Australia, the US and Europe. They extend a preoccupation with the uncanny that runs through McFarlane's body of work. Stylistically, McFarlane errs on the side of minimalism. These are stories of considerable subtlety and restraint. Highway 13 endeavours to surprise – not at the level of the individual sentence, but in what its sentences imply. It invites us to notice: when the bodies of stink beetles are dumped in a garden corner where 'ants had made feasts of the softer flesh', we can't help but see in their decomposing corpses the shadow of a crime. Highway 13 is more concerned with the murders' distant precursors (in the lives of others) and long-term ramifications (the way it resurfaces after the event) than in finding narrow causes. It tactfully avoids too-obvious parallels between the fictional Paul Biga and real Ivan Milat. In these ways, McFarlane creates space for her marvellous collection to linger with the living, with those bound to each other in their respective presents by fragile forms of love. Theory and Practice takes place primarily in St Kilda, Melbourne, in 1986. It is narrated by a female university student, unnamed for most of the novel, who is writing her thesis on Virginia Woolf. 'Theory', she observes with distaste, has 'conquered the humanities', especially the English department where she studies. When compelled to read theorists, rather than the novels she loves, she feels 'headachey and crushed'. Even the work of feminist and postcolonial theorists, which she draws on to help explain her life as a Sri Lankan woman from Sydney, leaves her ambivalent. 'Practice', on the other hand, describes her life as it is lived. In this novel, practice decidedly wins. The narrator is vexed by casual lovers – she is having an affair with a fellow student in a 'deconstructed relationship' – and hypocritical professors. She's also outraged by a diary entry in which Woolf describes Ceylonese freedom fighter EW Perera as a 'poor little mahogany coloured wretch'. Theory and Practice is at its best when it embraces its title's distinction, which it elsewhere compellingly glosses as the distinction between 'realism and reality', through a cast of characters adept at talking their way out of our attempts to interrogate them. The Miles Franklin literary award will be announced on 24 July This article was originally published by the Conversation. Joseph Steinberg is a Forrest foundation postdoctoral fellow in English and literary studies at the University of Western Australia
Daily Mail
3 hours ago
- Daily Mail
'GUTTED IT ENDED THE WAY IT DID ...' Stricken Darcy Graham admits his tour with British and Irish Lions is over
Darcy Graham has confirmed his British and Irish Lions tour is over after his tearful exit from the field in Melbourne this week. The Scotland winger had been elated to receive a late call-up by head coach Andy Farrell after missing out on the initial squad. However, his dream Lions debut turned sour just minutes after touching down for a try against a First Nations and Pasifika XV when he was forced to hobble off with an ankle injury. The 28-year-old, who was consoled by Scotland team-mate Finn Russell as he watched the rest of a 24-19 win from the bench, yesterday posted a message on Instagram admitting his Lions adventure has been cut cruelly short. '16 minutes I'll never forget,' he wrote. 'It's been a rollercoaster of a journey but it was a dream come true to pull on the famous red jersey and make my Lions debut. 'Gutted it ended the way it did, but so proud to have been part of this special group. Thank you for all the support. We try again in 4 years time...'. Edinburgh star Graham, who was later seen wearing a protective boot, has suffered a series of injuries in recent times and will be anxiously awaiting the results of a scan. Called up for the injured Mack Hansen, he will miss the final two Tests against Australia, with Farrell's men needing one more win to clinch the series after last weekend's opening victory. Farrell said after Graham's latest injury upset: 'He's devastated. He was so upset. You could see how much it meant to him hobbling off. He's got a Lions caps, he's played for the British and Irish Lions and scored a try. He'll remember that forever.'
