Everything including sport has its risks
According to a swift google-research I conducted just now it was in a book first published in 1996 entitled Life and How to Survive It co-written with his therapist Robin Skynner that John Cleese penned the quote “life is a terminal disease and it is sexually-transmitted”.
Slightly awkward – and to some extent troubling in the context of ambitions, planning, even just getting out of bed to face the world of everyday living – as it is to contemplate this blindingly-obvious fact, I don’t personally feel it does any harm to remind ourselves of the first half of statement now and again.
I’ve done it several times in the last couple of months as team sports such as football and now rugby union have been forced to address head-on the long-term cumulative effects upon the head and brain of the routine physical contact involved in their games.
And – more recently – we’ve been reminded of both the inherent dangers that will always attend Formula One and the fact that the female body is frailer than the male generally when it comes to strains upon joints and muscles and indeed “resistance to the effects of concussion”.
This reckoning was always going to happen at some point.
Hunting; going to sea; taking part in war and conquest (and indeed the resisting of the latter); physical contests; driving; flying to foreign lands; games; pastimes; competitions; hobbies; just living in vulnerable places at times of natural disasters … all these human activities are or can be dangerous if your luck is against you.
And sometimes also when it isn’t.
Boxing – like the demon alcoholic drinking – has always had its detractors and abolitionists. No doubt the recent rise to prominence of mixed martial arts has also attracted its opponents of principle.
It stands to reason that repeated blows taken to any part of the head are best avoided if possible and in these pastimes such inconveniences are deliberate – and not just incidental – aspects of the business at hand.
When you think about it, if safety and the avoidance of injury was a key (or indeed any) priority, nobody in their right mind would take up a slew of winter sports, e.g. downhill skiing, tobogganing … and certainly not take up the practice of hurtling down a mountain-side track with their feet strapped to two pieces of wood before propelling themselves into the air in order to see who can jump the furthest (ski jumping).
At a fundamental level the complicating factor of consent to knowingly taking the risk of participating in a physical contact sport comes into it. How and to what extent does personal consent come into any sport or pastime and thereby absolve the organisers/administrators of a contest of responsibility for its inherent dangers, whatever they might be?
I go back to the above John Cleese quote.
Life is dangerous. Some sports – no, all sports and pastimes – are to varying extents hazardous to health.
Where on the spectrum of “inherently dangerous” is any sport … and what can those who are attracted to it – in organising, taking part, spectating, following its teams – do to minimise the effects if they should occur?
The thing is, anyone who participates in sport at any level from novice amateur right up to elite international exponent is exposing themselves to risk of everything and anything from tiny niggle to traumatic injury – including chronic stress conditions or repetitive strain damage to bones, joints and sinews.
And you know what?
If asked – either before they took the sport up, or much later when they were long retired from it through age (or prematurely through injury?) – I’d go so far as to suggest that the overwhelming majority of them would admit that they’d do it all again if they only had the chance?
Aches and pains potentially with “come with the territory” when anyone takes up extreme activity in any form.
Many of those games and sports that provide the greatest amounts of exhilaration, thrills, excitement, satisfaction, joy and triumph (and the opposite) are currently “looking to their laurels” when the subject of health and safety comes into the equation.
They can pay all the lip service they like to “having always had the prevention of injury” as a key or main priority, but it’s difficult to believe it when – to any disinterested and impartial observer – the very nature of the sport/contest concerned involves physical contact and depends upon domination of the opponent in the cause of victory.
And when – as so often happens in sports – everyone involved (participating or watching) knows that the most memorable contests are those in which strength, stamina, outlasting the opponent and the sheer determination not to lose decide the outcome.
I present all this to Rusters this morning knowing full well, of course, that (as with anyone else) it’s not out of the question that I may be hit by a bus later this morning as I cross the road to buy my daily newspaper.
