Concussed by Sam Peters

Author:Sam Peters
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allen and Unwin

With access to training often strictly limited, especially with England, I sensed there was a serious issue there but couldn’t prove it. Yet. I became determined to understand what neurology and neuropathology experts without ties to sport were talking about and attended lectures at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, St Thomas’s and the Royal London hospitals among others, to find out what experts were saying. I also visited Birmingham University where I spent a day in the company of Professors Tony Belli and Michael Grey

These were not places I’d expected to find myself when I started out as a sports journalist. But there were several common themes which kept emerging when I attended these respective centres of excellence, unrelated to sport. One was that the debate over whether repetitive head injuries could cause long-term neuro-impairments had been resolved many decades earlier with the work of people such as Harrison Martland, Augustus Thorndike and the many other neurological research studies mentioned earlier, not least Boston University’s. Others would emerge in the years to come. The more pertinent question was around the extent of the problem and, perhaps even more importantly, how to mitigate these risks. Reducing exposure to head injuries was universally accepted as a means by which to reduce long-term risk.

I was incredibly fortunate that Alison and Mike appreciated this was a topic I needed to immerse myself in deeply and, on occasion, they would accept me disappearing off in different directions to speak to people seemingly completely unrelated to rugby, the actual subject I had been brought onto the paper for.

The issue became the talk of the Twickenham press box, even though I was still very much a lone voice when it came to writing about CTE red flag and longer-term risks. It was clear the majority of my fellow rugby journalists, although by no means all, thought I was going over the top in the way I was reporting on concussion. Others, Dan among them, applauded my stance.

The suggestion head injuries could in some way be linked to issues like Parkinson’s or motor neurone disease filled me with horror. No one involved in rugby at the time could have failed to have been moved by the memory of former London Irish full back Jarrod Cunningham’s fight against and ultimate defeat by MND, but to my knowledge no one for a second suggested it could have been linked to the possibility he may have banged his head too many times.

But when former Springbok Joost van der Westhuizen was diagnosed with the disease, aged 42, in 2011, I started to ask questions. Some simple digging found other names: fellow Springbok Ruben Kruger died of brain cancer in 2010 aged 39, while in November 2014, Tinus Linee, a centre who played nine times for the Springboks without a full Test cap, died, aged 45, from MND. This may well have been a desperately sad coincidence, but some, including me, thought it entirely plausible that, with our growing understanding of

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