We saw this article about a US athlete who has threatened to sue the University rowing programme she belonged to.
Here are our thoughts:
The athlete is a coxswain who injured herself doing the running training; she’d come in as a non-athlete with no training background and seems to have hurt herself in an unusual way.
We think you can’t blame the coach for not having experienced the type of injury before as it was a very unusual condition.
But it’s quite possible that you can see her/him sending everyone off with not much care about warm-up/stretching? If we’re being honest, I think we’ve all done it and yes, there’s always a “hobbler” at the end of a run even if it is only blisters because they didn’t bring their running shoes.
So that’s the bit the coach could have helped prevent.
After the injury though, my feeling is that it becomes the responsibility of the athlete to determine what treatment they should have and when they’re ready to come back to training. This girl’s lack of experience clearly contributed but it seems she didn’t get good guidance either
.
What do you think?