So many stories and headlines this morning, but one item buried on the BBC website has had no mention on the radio or TV amidst all the action.
So sad. I have a very complicated view of boxing. I understand that it has a role in communities, I’ve even spent time at a local club trying to engage young people on issues such as knife crime. I understand that the sport has a primeval quality and is skilful and has a long history. However I read about something like this and hesitate. Accidents happen in lots of sports. Jockeys suffer frequent injuries, rugby concussions etc but boxing is a sport who’s entire purpose is to beat up your opponent and ideally inflict a brain injury (ie knockout). This lad was, effectively, beaten to death. Is this really acceptable? Difficult.
For me, it comes down to choice. Participants will be aware of the potential risks - as long as they pose no hazard to third parties I am OK with them having the agency to decide for themselves.
I suspect that “choice” is a very simplistic answer. Kids often come to boxing via communities where the perception, accurately or not, is that there’s very little choice. Having been involved to a degree with one local club which swept up local kids who perceived they had little future, I would very much say that, excellently run and inclusive as it was, the evidence of risk being fully explained is negligible to nil and the idea that it is explained is one which very much resides in the heads of people who want to explain everything with “Well it’s your choice as long as…” when actually the evidence for both parts of that statement is pretty much nil.
All that said, whilst I’m not a huge fan, I’m more than happy to pay to watch some of the bigger fights so we have to admit to entirely contradictory impulses on these things.
In recent years I have concluded that in many ways boxing perhaps gets a raw deal because the injuries and deaths are so immediate. We are beginning to recognise that other sports may kill as many and maybe more people but do it over a longer time. The issues around contact in rugby are increasingly obvious and the brain damage risks of heading a football being but 2 of the most examples.
As a cyclist, I’m regularly upset by the constant drip-drip of fatalities. These are tragic whether in training ‘accidents’ - aka killed by car drivers - or in races…
Did you see the crash in Etoile de Besseges the other day? Tubeless tyre came off the rim. Possibly due to the rim having cracked after hitting a pothole earlier in the stage. There’s speculation that this is what happened to Gino Mader…
I’m a bit conflicted about this. On the one hand, the increase in cost for Discovery Premium is considerable, on the other, it’s only a £ a day for hours of coverage at a time when a coffee costs £3.50 in decent cafes…
