Parents dealing with safety in sports

I hope you're enjoying the Winter Olympics in Sochi at the moment - we've seen some incredible action and drama there. There have been so many stunningly good competitors who have missed out on a medal and there were many tears shed there. One thing that did scare the living daylights out of me was when I saw Canadian skiier Yuki Tsubota crash so badly during the women's slopstyle ski finals that she broke her jaw and was knocked out cold.  There was another scary moment when Czech Snowboarder Sarka Pancochova fell so hard on her head that she actually cracked her safety helmet. Yikes. So today, I want to talk about the issue of safety in sports from the point of view of parents/guardians as I would like to introduce more common sense into the debate on this issue please.

That's me, after a fall whilst skiing.

My parents were terrified of me getting hurt during sports. I think it is because my parents were primary school teachers, their first instinct was always, "don't get hurt" and I can see why they do that. I have this quite vivid (and nasty) memory of when I was about 8 years old, I was watching a bunch of older kids in the primary school playing 'zero-point' (oh those were the days - I bet my younger readers have no idea what that is). This girl slipped when she was trying to jump over the rubber-band rope and landed flat on her face. There was blood streaming from her nose and nose as her face had slammed pretty hard into the concrete. The sound of her face hitting the floor was scary as I could hear bones cracking. She was in such shock she didn't cry but the girls around her started crying. The nearest teacher heard the commotion and when he arrived, his first reaction puzzled me then (but now I get it). He said something like, "What have you done?!" in a rather angry manner, rather than expressing concern for the injured girl.

As a qualified gymnastics coach, I know what it is like to be in a position of responsibility over a group of children - the last thing you want is an accident like that on your watch, because it meant that you had to deal with the consequences; even if you didn't cause the accident, somehow as a teacher you should have prevented it from happening in the first place. We call this concept "in loco parentis" - that is Latin for "in the place of a parent" refers to the legal responsibility of a person or organization to take on some of the functions and responsibilities of a parent. So I suppose the primary school teacher may have been afraid that he would've been held responsible for the terrible injuries of the girl who fell during the game of zero-point. It is an unenviable position to be in to say the least.

When I told my parents about the accident I had witnessed, their first reaction was, "don't play zero-point". Of course, that sounded ridiculous to me - this was a traditional game played by so many Singaporeans for so many decades (well, I doubt youngsters these days play it anymore) - why ban a game just because one girl fell? She could have just as well fallen down a flight of stairs - what are you going to do then, ban all staircases from primary school buildings? But there you go, that's why my parents' 'teacher mindset' shaped the way they viewed my involvement in gymnastics.

Are teachers normally risk averse? 

Perhaps there's a part of me that is looking to make excuses for my parents - but I can't tell you how paranoid my mother was of me breaking a bone during gymnastics and for the record, I've broken several over the years. Smashed up my left fibula real bad when I was in my late teens (needed surgery), smashed my ankles up before, couples of fingers and toes and then not that long ago I fractured a bone in my left ankle. Gymnastics has really punished my body over the years.  That was my mother's excuse or reason to object to my gymnastics all these years and she is still totally paranoid about it - but then again, I've seen the way she is paranoid about most things in life (no, she isn't a rational person, sorry to be blunt) so I've learnt to ignore her and not take her seriously.

So how do you, as a parent (or guardian/older sibling) deal with the risk factor of your child/ward taking part in sports? This is something I have dealt with in two previous articles specifically dealing with the question of fat people doing sports - namely gymnastics as well as skiing. I have a few basic points for you to help you get started.

1. Pay for proper lessons for your child.

You get what you pay for - sending your child to a proper sports club to participate in a lesson will mean that you can gladly hand your child over with the following factors in mind:

• the coaches are all fully qualified to teach your child
• the facilities would meet the standard of the governing body of the sport 
• the sports club will have the insurance to cover any accident that may happen
• the sports club is a business and will not risk an accident to jeopardize their reputation
• as the sports club operates as a business, they will have to provide a good service of a high standard otherwise their customers will desert them and go to a competitor

So it is a combination of proper governance from the regulatory body of the sport and more importantly, market forces, then ensures that these sports club have to deliver a safe environment where accidents are avoided at all costs. So when selecting a sports club for your child, check how big it is - has it been operating for many years or is it brand new? Are they affiliated and regulated by the sport's local governing body? Do they have a good reputation? What are the competitors to this sports club and what do other local parents recommend? If you want your child to be safe, then you need to do the homework in the first instance and select the best sports club for your child. 

Singapore's gymnastics superstar Lim Heem Wei.

2. Work on your child's behaviour 

I can tell you that most accidents happen because students/children misbehave. If the student does exactly as s/he is told, nothing bad will happen - it is only when students do not follow instructions and do the complete opposite, that's when nasty accidents occur. Let me share a story with you - I don't want to damage this swimming club's reputation so I won't mention their name, but it is a true story that a close friend related to me.

There is this swimming club in Singapore where young students are taught how to swim in the children's pool - it is not very deep, so that even if the child is standing upright, his head would be above the water as the water is only about 90 cm deep. The swimming coach had a class of about 6 children and one of the students was simply not interested in learning - his parents made him do the class but he felt bored with the lesson. So as the coach was busy attending to another student, this child climbed out of the children's pool, walked over to the adult pool (1.8 meters deep) and jumped in. The kid could barely swim and struggled as the water was way over his head. Fortunately, another swimmer spotted the child struggling and rescued the child from drowning. 

Whose fault was it that this child wandered away to the adult pool?

So whose fault was it? Yes of course the coach should have spotted the child wandering away to the adult pool in the first instance, but it transpired that this child's parents often allowed him to do as he wished - the child lacked boundaries. He was a problem child at school and would wander out of the classroom without telling the teacher - when the teacher stopped him and asked, "where do you think you're going?" The child would answer, "Just going to toilet lah, cannot meh?" As you can see, that child had no concept of authority or boundaries. 

Whilst the buck does stop with the swimming coach, there was so much the parents of this child could have done to prevent this accident from happening in the first place. Ensuring that your child behaves himself/herself and obeys the instructor is one of the most basic, fundamental lessons a parent has to instill in a child. Children need boundaries, a respect for authority, an understanding of how rules work and why it is necessary to obey instructions - if you want your child to be safe, then there's a lot you can do at home, as a parent to prepare your child for the big bad world out there where there can be serious consequences for not obeying the rules. 

Children need boundaries and this starts from an early age.

3. The concept of progression in sports

Let's talk about progression in sports - a coach will never allow a student to progress until the student is ready and even then, the progression is done in baby steps rather than giant leaps. Let's take gymnastics for example, in order for a gymnast to learn a new skill - it would be broken down into various components and the coach would make the gymnast train each component of the skill until the technique is reasonably good, before slowly putting it together for the final product. The student should not be allowed to attempt the 'final product' until each and every single aspect of the skill is mastered through the technique drills. 

A good coach would ensure that the student takes this course of progression at the right pace, only allowing the student to progress to the next step when s/he is ready. Accidents occur when students are so keen to learn new skills that they rush into the next step (without the coach's knowledge or consent) and attempt to do skills without the right technique. It happens a lot in sports, particularly with children who are enthusiastic and a bit headstrong. What can you do as a parent to mitigate that risk? Again, I go back to point 2: the coach-student relationship has got to work on the basis of the student trusting the coach and listening to the coach. The risk of accidents are hugely reduced when the student is progressing at the right pace, learning the correct technique and listening to the coach. 

4. Do not blame the sport, blame the people involved. 

There's this phrase that my mother used a lot which truly irked me, "gymnastics is so dangerous". Mind you, she feels the same way about most sports, so you can replace the word 'gymnastics with any other sport and she would still agree with that statement.  She doesn't get it and will never get it - but at least let me explain to you why this statement is flawed. When you make 'the sport' (skiing, gymnastics, snowboarding, diving, football etc) the enemy, then you give in to fear - you're creating a boogeyman in your mind which is an abstract entity, a scary foe that is menacing your beloved child. That's a highly irrational and unscientific way to approach the situation (I told you my mother was irrational and paranoid - sorry, just being brutally honest here.) 

Instead, there are people to be held accountable when accidents happen. Every time you look at an accident, you can always find someone to blame - maybe it is a coach who made a bad decision or a had a lapse of concentration with a student, maybe it is student who irresponsibly tried to do something he wasn't ready for, or maybe even it was an equipment malfunction (in which case, we then have to ask whose responsibility it was to check the equipment prior to the training session). Here's a classic case of equipment malfunction from 1975: 

So danger is caused not by the sport per se, but by people who make bad decisions, act irresponsibly or disobey clear instructions. All it takes is a healthy dose of common sense to deal with each individual human who can be held responsible for an error that happened - in the video above, the venue manager should have double checked if the uneven bars were set up correct and able to take the force exerted by the gymnasts. That's my rational response to the video above - the venue manager made an grave error of judgement (and no doubt should be held responsible for that mistake). My mother would watch that video and go into paranoia mode and just say, "gymnastics is dangerous". Let's all try to be rational, please. Risk and danger are created by people making mistakes - as long as the right people act responsibly and do their job, risk and danger can be greatly minimized. 

In the case of the terrible fall that Canadian Yuki Tsubota took this week during the women's slopestyle finals at the Sochi Olympics, the problem was that the weather conditions were unsuitable for the event as it was above zero and the snow had started melting, creating slushy, wet snow that slowed her approach right down just before her final jump. Hindsight was 2020 - she should have never attempted it that jump given that she was never going to get enough speed to complete it safely, so I would say that the blame lies between Tsubota herself and her coach. Surely both of them would have realized that such a jump would have been too risky to attempt under such conditions (even if an Olympic medal was at stake), so either the coach said "don't risk it" (and she still went for it - in which case it was her fault), or her coach said, "it's the Olympics, go for it" (in which case, it would have been his fault). I don't think we will ever find out what transpired between Tsubota and her coach in those few moments before her last run, but I am just relieved that she will be making a full recovery for it could have been so much worse. 

5. Such is life - accidents happen all the time. 

Let me tell you about a pretty nasty accident I had in 1992. This happened in the weeks leading up to the 1992 ASEAN Schools Games in Jakarta - I was training with the national schools team at the old Chinese High School gym (that old building no longer exists, it was demolished in 1992 and a brand new gym was built in 1993). There wasn't a toilet in the old gym - you had to walk outside to a separate building and walk up about three or four steps to the toilet.

As I was so excited to be training with the national schools team, I rushed my visit to the toilet and attempted to run back to the gym to rejoin the training. I will never forget what happened next - I missed the last step outside the toilet and fell really hard, flat on my face on the concrete floor. The crash was so loud that my team mates came running out of the gym to see what the commotion was. Fortunately, only my ankle was badly hurt (I had a couple of other bruises but nothing that serious) and I had to go to the hospital for an X-ray as I was in so much pain then.

I fell on my face coming out of the toilet. Talk about whoops!

When I had my X-ray taken, the friendly radiologist asked me, "so what happened? How did you fall? Sports accident?" I thought about it and replied, "Actually no. I was at gymnastics training, but I slipped and fell coming out of the toilet." I almost felt embarrassed admitting to such a silly accident, I could have lied but I didn't. The radiologist laughed and said, "Yeah it happens all the time, believe me, the number of people who fall in the toilet and end up in A&E. Who would've thought going to the toilet can be dangerous, right?"

You see, no teacher or coach in the world could have prevented that accident I had - and we just have to accept that in life, sometimes silly things happen and they can result in accidents and injury. When unfortunate accidents like that happen, the sensible thing to do is for the parent to accept that there's really no one to blame and take it in one's stride. You see, had the accident happened during gymnastics, it would have made my mother even more paranoid about the dangers of gymnastics - but it happened when I was going to the toilet, so shouldn't my mother be paranoid then about going to the toilet? After all, people can slip in the toilet if the floor is wet...

Gymnastics... not as dangerous as you think.

I have another equally funny story about a silly accident. When I was at university, my friend Joanna decided to miss gymnastics training one evening because she had to study for a test. So she stayed in the library studying when her mobile phone rang. Now you know you're not supposed to have your phone on in the library, so she reached into her pocket in a hurry to try to take her phone out and turn it off. In her hurry, her phone slipped out of her hands and she lurched forwards to try to catch her phone before it fell to the floor. Instead of catching her phone, she completely fell off her chair and hit the floor so hard she sprained her wrist really badly. We joked that if she had gone to gymnastics training instead that evening, she could have avoided that wrist injury. So yeah, I should tell my mother that story: studying in the library is more dangerous than gymnastics.

The fact is, even if you were to avoid all sports, you're not completely safe, you can still have accidents doing things like going to the toilet or studying in the library - so don't imagine that you're keeping your child completely safe by stopping them from doing sports. Life is uncertain and the least we can do is to prepare our children to deal with the curved balls that life may throw at us out of the blue. 

This is very dangerous - you were warned. 

6. Risk vs reward

At the end of the day, yes we accept that accidents can still happen even with the best coaches, best equipment, best behaved students and best systems in place - so why do we still take that risk and do sports then if the threat of accidents cannot be completely eliminated? Simple: the reward far outweighs the risks we take. Children get so much out of participating in sports: it is good for their health, they often have a lot of fun, it is a great social environment for them to learn values like team work and there is so much children can learn from the experience. The potential rewards far outweigh the risks by a long way, so the sensible conclusion is to accept the small amount of risks that comes with sports and just participate anyway for the long term rewards.

Any rational, sensible, intelligent person should be able to look at a situation and carry out a risks vs rewards analysis - take something like going on holiday for example. A lot can go wrong: you can lose your passport, you can get food poisoning, you can get involved in a car accident, you can miss your flight, you may encounter a flood, your plane could get hijacked - ooh need I go on? Yet we all still want to go on holiday because the rewards always outweigh the risks at the end of the day and usually, we do have a reasonably good time whilst on holiday. Risk vs rewards - that's not a hard concept to understand, is it? So why can't we apply this principle to sports?

That's me training on the parallel bars.

So let's take Joanna's unfortunate fall in the library, should we be concerned or worried the next time we sit down on a chair in the library? Of course not, because the risk of a similar accident happening is so extremely small it is not a risk that we need to be concerned about. The rewards of studying in the library far outweigh the risks of possibly falling off the chair there. Knowing my mother, she'll probably insist on all chairs in libraries having seat belts if my nephew had been the one who fell off the chair in a library.

If you are a parent and you feel that you don't have all the information to make an accurate risk vs reward analysis for your child, don't panic! There are plenty of resources out there for you to use to get the right information: be it online or within your local community. Chances are, unless you've participated in the sport yourself, your knowledge of your child's sport is going to be limited so rather than make a wrong decision based on the limited understanding of the sport that you have. If you want to be a good parent, you owe it to your child to make an informed decision with the help of others who can help supply you with the information you need.

So there you go, that's my guide to mitigating the risks in sports for parents with children involved in sports. I hope I have helped with your understanding of this tricky issue. I hope you have found it useful - if you have any questions about the issue, please feel free to leave me a comment below. Thank you very much for reading.