Sporting injuries

It is a strange phenomena, but when someone died while pursuing their chosen sport, as Philip Hughes did last week, it seems to hit us very hard. Everyone is shocked. And yet people aged 25 and less die every day, some of them may well be very talented people, who also never get to show their talent

This BBC article addresses this to an extent, because these people are the heroes of our times, they are achieving things that we could never do, despite the fact that we share the same basic physiology. But they are also people that we hero-worship, to greater or lesser degrees. Personally, I follow Formula one, where we have not had a fatality for a long time, which is really good news. However this season, Jules Bianchi had a very serious accident, and is still in hospital being treated, and will be for a long time yet. He demonstrates the dangers of the sport, dangers that are managed to a large extent, but not removed completely. Accidents in F1 demonstrate the skill that the drivers need to not have accidents more often. Bianchi demonstrates why accidents at this sort of speed, even in very safe cars, can still be very dangerous.

But I think there is another reason. When someone in the public eye dies unexpectedly it serves as a focus for our grief - grief for many others, grief for those we have not been able to mourn because there has been too many. It focusses feelings that people experience the rest of the time, but cannot explore.

This is why the comments that so often come that "hundreds of people die in x-country every day" are, I think, unhelpful. Yes, lots of people whose names we don't know die each day. Every one is a tragedy. If we were to let ourselves mourn each one by name, we would be overcome by grief, by the senselessness of it all, by a nihilism, because we, as humans, are not designed to take that level of grief. It would destroy us. But we feel it.

When we have a name we can put this grief onto, it is helpful, cathartic. When we see someone who is engaging in an entertainment activity (which sporting is, for the non-participants), we can focus the waste, the tragedy. We can grieve for one person, but in that, grieve for all of those who die needlessly, pointlessly, too young. And we can acknowledge that everyone dies "too young", we always want another day, another week, another year.

So yes, we are shocked when sports people die or are seriously injured. But I think this is because we are shocked when anyone dies, and this is our only way of expressing the pain of the hundreds and thousands of deaths that occur daily. We are made to exist in a social environment, but a small one of hundreds. We are, I think, overwhelmed by the social community that is the whole world. That is too much.