Ellis Genge has revealed that he and Eddie Jones were subjected to racist abuse on England’s tour of South Africa in 2018. Genge was a non-playing member of the squad for the three-Test tour and has spoken of an incident which took place after one the matches. In a wide-ranging interview with BBC 5 Live, Genge also spoke of the racist abuse he suffered when growing up in Bristol, the Black Lives Matters protests and called for more black coaches in elite rugby union. Genge’s comments follow those of the England footballer Raheem Sterling, who has spoken of the need for more black representation at the top of the game. Genge said the tearing down of the statue of slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol on Sunday was “warranted … after 10 years of asking”. Recalling his youth in Bristol, Genge said: “I still get that [racist abuse] now. You try and segregate yourself from all those people who are naive or ignorant enough to be racist, you try and stay away from it as much as you can, but you can’t shield yourself from everyone’s thoughts. “When we went on the South African tour in 2018 I remember after a game we were walking through one of the tunnels and they started hurling racist abuse at myself and a few of the other ethnic boys and Eddie himself. It is still very rife, especially in sport. Look, you can’t control that yourself, you just sort of need to put the message out there. Like Raheem Sterling said, if you have got a platform, you can use it. It’s something that needs to be stamped out.” Citing Paul Hull, his former coach at Bristol, Genge also echoed Sterling’s calls for more black coaches at the top end of the game. “Yeah, I’d like to see that. The issue in rugby is it has been a white man’s game for a number of years. There’s not really many black coaches or ethnic coaches, especially here in England. “I don’t think people are commercialised, especially the black and African boys in rugby or women to be icons, we are not presented like that. I can understand why the youth, and [with] the poverty today, don’t want to be rugby players because it is not the way we are presented, we’re sort of put on this posh pedestal and it’s slowly breaking the mould.” The BBC later apologised for using a picture of Lewis Ludlam – Genge’s England team-mate – in a story about the Leicester prop. Both Genge and Ludlam voiced their frustrations on Twitter, prompting a swift apology from the BBC’s online sports editor.