Sell the bike and buy a canoe if you want to cut your Olympic injury risk.
One of the best things about the Olympic Games is the opportunity it presents for armchair experts to pretend to be interested in sporting activities they would normally avoid like the plague.
Your Back Page correspondent, for example, particularly enjoys the gymnastics and diving events purely for the physical jeopardy afforded by a backwards somersault on a 10cm-wide beam or a handstand triple pike with tuck turn from a 10m platform.
Who among us is not thinking: “Yikes! That’s really going to hurt if things go pear-shaped.”
Certainly the folks at online casino site Casinority were musing along these lines, because they commissioned research into Olympic injury data to identify which sports are the riskiest for beginners to participate in.
Analysing data compiled by the British Journal of Sports Medicine tracking back to the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the researchers found a surprising winner in the bodily-harm stakes: BMX cycling.
According to the study, more than one-third of Olympic participants in this discipline suffered an injury during competition.
The risk was exceptionally high in the 2016 games in Rio, with 37.5% of BMX riders injured, compared with 31.3% in 2012 in London, while the Tokyo competition saw a decline to 26% – which, frankly, still seems pretty high.
By comparison, the second-most dangerous Olympic pursuit, taekwondo, seems a bit more intuitive. This Korean martial art, which involves lots of punching and kicking, yielded a highly competitive 30% of athletes suffering injuries.
Coming in third place overall, at a creditable 27%, was football, although how many of those injuries were play-acting in the hope of winning a penalty was not recorded.
On the other side of the coin, the least injury-prone sports are water-based, with canoe slalom, kayaking and rowing all racing home with injury rates under 3%. Shooting and archery were also, thankfully, relatively safe pursuits for athletes, as were swimming and, perhaps surprisingly, equestrian events and track cycling.
It’s a shame the injury statistics only began being collected from 2008, because Olympic Games in times of yore used to include some truly bizarre and hazardous events. Such as in the 1900 Paris games where competitive poodle-clipping (no, that is not a euphemism) was an actual thing. Or pistol duelling, which was a feature of the 1912 Stockholm games (although the contestants didn’t get to fire their guns at each other, rather they shot at smartly attired mannequins).
Still, with newer and more youth-oriented pursuits such as skateboarding and breakdancing being introduced to the Olympic programs, it’s only a matter of time before BMX racing faces serious competition in the injury stakes.
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