TMX Says: Avoiding injury has its risks
By TMX Archives on 19th Apr 17
EVERY so often the Johnston Press hierarchy will get a bee in their bonnets about something or quite frequently nothing.
This means that they'll get in my manager's ear and then he gets in my ear until it gets sorted out or simply skirted around long enough for the issue to be forgotten as the next ‘really important thing' becomes priority.
Last week's hot topic was risk assessments which for most of the company is as dull as ensuring people don't staple documents to their own foreheads and always hover over – rather than sit directly on – the photocopier glass while Xeroxing their behinds.
However, when you're dealing with something as dangerous as dirt biking, doing risk assessments can be a long and laborious task that totally saps your will to live.
In fact, I often wonder if someone has done a risk assessment on people having to do risk assessments. I'll bring it up in the next meeting...
Although I often moan about health and safety and risk assessments and stuff I do believe that they're important things – to a degree. That's because I also believe that a certain amount of free will and choice is essential to a healthy lifestyle.
I also reckon there's a certain amount of hypocrisy involved when a company will say ‘you can't do this because it's dangerous' but then sanction smoking breaks and build a special shelter so smokers don't get wet when it rains (and die of pneumonia or something). Safety first and all that...
It's almost like some companies want to prolong your misery by dictating that you can't do something that might be deemed slightly dangerous, especially if it's fun.
They will however happily up your workload and increase your stress levels because stress ain't a proven killer nor it ain't not nor nothing.
If you're wondering what's set me off on this tangent then blame Jake Nicholls who'll be lying on his back for the next three weeks after dislocating his hip at the weekend. The bizarre thing is he managed to pop it without even crashing his bike – but how? I reckon it's safety equipment that's to blame...
After staying stagnant for decade after decade, at some point in the 1990s MX boot technology changed. Until then it'd always been the same – steel-shanked rubber soles stitched to leather uppers with some form of shin protection. The high-end versions maybe had a plastic shift-lever protector.
Basically, after the ‘break-in' period they were really flexible and offered very little in the way of ankle support. That meant rolled and broken ankles – along with other assorted lower leg injuries – were fairly common in off-road motorcycle sports. To combat those, boots got stiffer, oh-so more supportive and with the ankles secure, knees became the next weak spot in the leg line.
To combat the new influx of knee injuries, knee braces were thought up and then developed with the aim of them being to stop twisting and over extension of the leg joint. The end result was that a well-fitted, high-end pair of braces proved to be remarkably adept at saving the user from any injury. Good work, fellas!
However, that force still has to be dissipated somewhere and if you've got a super-strong ankle connected to a cast-iron knee then I guess it's the hip that's next. When you consider the length of a leg and the leverage it's possible to produce with something so long it's perhaps not all that surprising that the ‘right' type of impact could do catastrophic damage.
Maybe having a broken ankle isn't so bad after all...
