Olympic whiplash
22/08/2008

for athletes and for us


While I'm not a big sports fan, it's difficult to avoid the Olympics at the moment, particularly with my personal injury colleagues putting it on the radio and watching across the internet. But the human stories still get me, like this American gymnast, Chelsie Memmel, competing through whiplash and a broken ankle.

Now, that's commitment. She scaled back her events, of course, so was just competing on the uneven bars, but was still part of the team getting to a silver medal.

If I understand the story right, though, it's commitment that led to her receiving the whiplash neck injury in the first place, from over-reaching in the pre-Olympic training. But isn't that how we stretch ourselves?

I'm probably the wrong person to be looking at this If you ask me about no win, no fee arrangements, I know enough to make sense, but why athlete X gets a no win, no medal situation often escapes me. This used to make me the annoying one in the pub that asked why X had done that last move just as they moved into the next; but being aware of that means I stopped. (Promise!)

Before I realised how sport-happy the rest of the team here were, I was expecting the sort of Olympic whiplash mentioned elsewhere on the internet to be more common - where your other projects are disrupted by the weeks of games.

That is, you get a shock from the sudden cessation of the sort of thing you'd normally be doing, whether it's a favourite TV programme being cancelled for exclusive discus coverage, or your weekly pub quiz being abandoned because everyone else is off watching the sports. The non-sports fan finds himself or herself pulled up rapidly as if in an imaginary car crash, the expected forward momentum lost.

It's interesting to see, actually, that it's a phrase that also gets used by people who do enjoy the Games. I've seen one craft site with a thread on its forum where people are talking about the Olympic whiplash suffered by their crafty projects - the knitting abandoned on laps while the long distance runners complete their laps, the letterpress printing cast aside as the swimmers break record after record.

Interesting, but less than useful; what can you do with a phrase that means both? Unless we imagine the Olympics as one car, and the other projects as another, and - just as it is outside the metaphor - you can't necessarily tell which driver will suffer a neck injury in the collision.

Fortunately, no-one ever needs to be cut from the smoking wreckage of a piece of knitting that's suffered Olympic whiplash. Which is not to say that knitting needles never feature in a personal injury claim, but that's a different story.

Can I claim?