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Sports administrators shoulder hefty responsibilities, demanding deftness, courage and commitment. But above all else, they are custodians of the sports they are charged with governing and their objective should be to leave the sport in a better place than they found out.
The main reason sports have governing bodies is to minimise individual biases, so decisions are made for the greater good.
The US Golf Association and the R&A – together the governing bodies for golf worldwide – have proclaimed they’re upending the table by forcing manufacturers to detune golf balls to make the game harder and more frustrating for all players, from weekend hackers to professionals. Equipment manufacturers are next in the firing line.
So the golf ball will fly less distance, and perform worse in 2030 than in 2023 – all because Rory McIlroy, Jon Rahm and co can bomb the ball miles and there’s supposedly no room to make courses longer.
The decision by the USGA and the R&A seems myopic and poorly thought out. It is a “solution” that ignores every other component of this supposed problem, such as club technology and course design.
Golf ball manufacturers were never going to be interested in making special, less-performing balls for professionals, and forcing change was never going to be limited to the golf on television. The notion that only pros would play with dumbed-down balls was always a hoax.
It won’t just be the likes of Rory McIlroy affected by the rule changes for golf balls.Credit: Getty Images
Should FIFA narrow the goalposts in football if there’s a string of high-scoring seasons? Should the NBA install hoops six inches higher? Of course not. As it is with golf, the sport would be poorer for the change.
Conversely, consider rugby. Leave aside the calamities of 2023, the most important decision Rugby Australia made in the past decade came a few days ago.
In a two-year trial starting in February, the laws for all rugby in Australia below the elite Super Rugby level will change so a legal tackle must be below the ball-carrier’s sternum. Before, it was legal for a defending player to tackle the ball-carrier below the height of the attacking player’s shoulders.
The intention of the change is multidimensional. Firstly, it aims to reduce incidences of the defending player’s arms hitting the ball-carrier’s head. Secondly, if the defender must tackle below the attacking player’s sternum, there is less likelihood of head-to-head contact, which is often the cause of the most sickening collisions.
The planned implementation of these rules isn’t a thought bubble from a desperate organisation stumbling to shift the narrative. Rather, they are a product of World Rugby’s research and deliberate consideration. Once the sports administrators had the research that identified the causes of harm, it was their responsibility to act, not least because they can become legally liable for injuries (or worse) that flow from failure to do so.
One of World Rugby’s studies, published in 2017 in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, analysed over 600 incidences of head injury assessments in matches spanning a three-year period.
The authors found three-quarters of those HIAs arose from a tackle scenario, as opposed to a scrum or other incident of head trauma. Researchers found the tackler was at far greater risk of head injury than the ball-carrier to a factor of nearly three. That is significant, because the sport’s rules had been designed and tinkered with to focus on the safety of the ball-carrier.
The researchers concluded that all contact types in rugby – except for head-to-arm, head-to-ground and whiplash injuries – expose the tackler to greater risk of harm. That invited the possibility that the laws should preferentially protect the tackler, not just focus on the ball-carrier.
Therefore, what’s perhaps not properly understood about the new rules, which Rugby Australia will enforce from 2024, is they aren’t designed with the primacy of protecting the ball-carrier. It’s largely the opposite.
There is no greater responsibility for a sport’s administrators than to construct rules to best protect participants from harm. Rugby can never be made inherently safe but its administrators are obliged to make it as risk-free as possible.
If sports such as rugby, boxing and American football didn’t already exist, they would not get the social licence to be established today.
The governance of sports – in particular collision and combat sports – constitutes an endless loop of amending the rules and introducing new ones, to make inherently dangerous practices less risky. Head injuries in sport, and concussion management especially, represent an existential crisis for dangerous sports, some of which won’t exist 50 years from now without considered administration. Society simply won’t countenance their continued existence, without radical change.
It’s a balancing act. You can’t have nursing homes full of banged-up ex-athletes who can’t tell you their names because of repeated brain traumas, yet you can’t remove the contact element from rugby because then it isn’t rugby any more.
Max Douglas takes the full force of a high tackle from Pone Fa’amausili in a Super Rugby match.Credit: Getty
Rugby players voluntarily assume the risks associated with playing one of the toughest sports there is. One shouldn’t argue that players should not be free to assume those risks.
Therefore, the role of the sport’s administrators – defining and refining the sport with the times, science and medicine – becomes one of implementing the safest systems possible, whatever the cost. That’s why RA’s introduction of these regulations is so huge.
Hindsight has a remarkable way of skewering actuality. Ayrton Senna was the second-last person to die behind the wheel of a Formula 1 car at a sanctioned race weekend. His death at Imola in 1994, and the death of a fellow competitor, Austria’s Roland Ratzenberger, in practice two days earlier, ignited a paradigm shift towards safety in F1.
Racetrack architecture changed to include safety features and long run-off areas; driver safety protocols and cockpit designs were radically overhauled. It was at Imola, almost 30 years ago now, that motor racing plummeted to its deepest nadir. If he were alive today, Senna wouldn’t recognise F1 now, even though he was the best driver who lived.
Two deaths in a weekend. Formula 1 could not allow it to happen again. If only it had not taken the awfulness of those three days to turn the sport’s collective attention to safety.
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