WHY IS SCIENCE IMPORTANT?
A SPORT’S relationship with science is troubling at the best of times. Science starts by fuelling performance, which makes many feel uneasy anyway, but in collision sports the implications of improved performance are profound for player welfare. Then science steps in to lay out before sport in gory detail the damage it is doing to itself.
The final twist in the relationship is when science presents itself as sport’s only hope for salvation.
Rugby finds itself somewhere between the last two stages of this pas de deux. The effects of full-time professionalism and improved techniques in the, well, science of preparation have exposed players to ever-escalating levels of repetitive “insult”, as the scientists like to term traumatic events of even the mildest nature. This seems to be resulting in that other recent finding of science – that players are suffering the symptoms of dementia at uncommonly early ages.
What is beyond doubt, statistically, is
