2 Spotlight: sport injury

Unfortunately, sport injury is something that athletes commonly experience during their careers. Depending on its nature and severity a sport injury can lead to several difficult transitions such as temporary withdrawal from sport or in some cases premature retirement from sport. These can have a significant impact on the athlete as you will discover in the rest of this session.

Activity 2 Responses to sport injury

Timing: Allow about 25 minutes

Watch the video below in which Olympic medallist (hockey) Helen Richardson-Walsh describes her experience of sport injury. Then reflect on any personal experiences you have had of sport injury (either as an athlete or as someone supporting an athlete) and think about the psychological impact the injury had.

Make a list of some of the common psychological reactions that you think an athlete might have in response to a sport injury.

Download this video clip.Video player: Video 2

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Transcript: Video 2

HELEN RICHARDSON-WALSH

As a full-time hockey player, I've experienced, unfortunately many injuries-- lots of little niggles, a few muscle tears. But I've also, unfortunately, experienced some quite big injuries that kept me out of the game for some time. When I was around 21, 22, I had an ankle injury which needed three operations, and I was out the game for two years.

More recently, I had double back surgery within the space of a year. That was hard to take. I missed a World Cup, which was very difficult. And it took a lot of hard work and some mental resilience to get me back to the sport that I love.

When I experienced those injuries, I had, obviously, the physical effects but also had to deal with the psychological effects. And there were many. Trust me. I found one of the things I did straight away was kind of isolate myself from the group, which I found really weird because I was someone who was very sociable. And I suddenly found I didn't want to be around the people that were doing what I wanted to do. I guess I was a little bit jealous of that and so took myself away.

I had a fair bit of embarrassment because I didn't get selected for a tournament, and I'd always been selected for a tournament. And there was kind of fear and anxiety that I couldn't get back to the sport that I played and had a dream of becoming an Olympic champion. That was a massive goal for me, and this injury was getting in my way.

Kind of encompassing that was a loss of identity as well. I really saw myself as a hockey player. And when I was injured, I struggled to mentally get around that, because was I a hockey player anymore because I couldn't actually physically play it? Plus the whole thing of not being able to do the thing that all my friends are doing because that's my social group. So there were so many mental aspects that I had to deal with when I was injured.

There was always a kind of progression with how I went through to get back on the pitch. Initially, when I was told that I was-- had the pain and told that I had to have surgery-- it was actually quite a fearful time. Surgery on your back, in particular with me, is quite scary. And so I was scared. It's not a nice thing to have to go through. But once I had the surgery and the surgeon comes in and says everything's fine, it was all about setting a plan. And that really helped me. I love plans, and once I was on that I kind of got the confidence to be able to go forward.

But unfortunately, the plan never works out. Always something comes up. And I always tell people now when they're going through injuries expect stuff to go wrong. And having that expectation is actually quite helpful, because I got to the point where because it's not going right, you kind of feel hopeless. You're thinking is this going to work out? You go through those different transitions, but once I was getting closer to the pitch that obviously helps.

But when you get back onto the pitch, then you're not as good as you were. And that's something really difficult to deal with. You're not as fit. Your skills aren't quite as good. And so you go through another difficult time. And then it's about setting your own expectations about how long things are going to take and how quickly you can get back to where you were.

End transcript: Video 2

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Video 2

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Discussion

Everyone’s experience of sport injury is different, but common reactions to injury include:

• feelings of isolation
• fear
• anxiety
• hopelessness
• loss of identity
• anger
• depression
• grief
• loneliness
• stress
• anxiety
• low self-esteem.

You may well recognise some of these feelings from your own experiences of sport injury. These feelings are all largely negative emotions, but experiencing sport injury can sometimes lead to some positive consequences. For example, some athletes believe that the experience of injury makes them a better athlete by giving them a new perspective or allowing them to develop new skills while on the sidelines. These gains are often referred to as ‘sport injury related growth’ (Salim and Wadey, 2018).

Activity 2 demonstrates that adjusting to sport injury can be a difficult transition for people to cope with. Not only is sport injury difficult to deal with when it occurs and during injury rehabilitation, but once the injury has recovered, the return to sport can also represent a difficult period of transition. You will examine this in the next section.