Watching the Olympic high divers execute their near flawless routines you have to wonder what their parents are thinking when they see their flesh and blood hurl their bodies off a 33-foot high block of cement into a pool of water. And when the divers heads come so close to the platform… yikes! I get chills just thinking about it.
You can’t put a price tag on the pride that comes when your child is passionate about a physical activity, but every parent knows that some forms of exercise are more dangerous than others.
Take the sport of cheerleading for example. According to a new study, cheerleading routines, which are packed with daredevil flips and human pyramids, account for 65% of catastrophic injuries among high school girl athletes in the last quarter century. The same study also found that cheerleading also is responsible for 67% of catastrophic injuries among female college athletes during the past 25 years.
Researchers define catastrophic injuries as the following: fatal injuries; injuries that cause a severe permanent functional disability; and serious injuries such as a broken neck or other severe fracture.
Interestingly, the study’s original goal was to look at football injuries in order to prevent future catastrophic injuries. But when researchers discovered how many serious injuries were sustained by cheerleaders they tailored the study accordingly.
Researchers found that from 1982 to 2007, there were 103 direct injuries to female high school students participating in the study, of those 67 were due to cheerleading. According to the study, no other sport even came close. Gymnastics came in second with nine injures and track had seven. Similar results were found with female athletes in college. The study showed there were 39 injuries total with 26 due to cheerleading, three due to field hockey, two due to gymnastics, and two due to lacrosse.
The study revealed that falls from pyramids were the leading cause of cheerleading related injuries. The majority of falls led to concussions, skull fractures, paralysis, and in some cases, death. Other injuries occurred when cheerleaders attempted back flips and when they were tossed into the air and dropped.
Experts fear that the number of injuries will rise even more if coaches keep increasing the difficulty of cheerleading routines. To prevent that from happening the authors of the study devised 11 safety recommendations, including: Not allowing pyramids over two levels and banning mini-trampolines and flips off pyramids.
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