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Harm and the man

'Even the mildest forms of sport are bad for you. The moment you start challenging your body to do unnatural things, you are at risk'

Miles Kington
Monday 22 July 2002 00:00 BST
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I used to know a chap called Peter Buckman (hello, Peter), who worked for Penguin at a time when it was issuing that once very popular book of Canadian Air Force exercises. Peter had edited it painstakingly, so he was slightly upset to get a letter from a reader who said that, having purchased the book of exercises, he had promptly pulled a muscle.

"If you had read the introduction properly," Peter had written back admonishingly, "you would have been given adequate briefing on how to do these exercises safely."

"No, you don't understand," the reader wrote back. "It was when I was reading the introduction that the accident occurred. I yawned so hard that I pulled a muscle."

When he told me this story, it confirmed my growing suspicion that even the mildest forms of sport and exercise tend to be bad for you. The moment you start challenging your body to do unnatural things, you are at risk. This was a lesson spelled out to me years ago by Clive James, and even if a few people have heard it before, I want the rest of you to hear it again. It came at a time when I was organising a cricket XI to represent Punch magazine and thought that an Aussie like James would be a natural for a cricket side. Not so.

"I never take part in manly sports, Miles," he told me, "and nor will you if you are wise. For anyone who is in the public eye, the risk of injury is too great. Think of Mark Boxer's thumb. Think of Hunter Davies's back. Think of Melvyn Bragg's knee..." And he reeled off a list of crocked artists which was quite impressive. In fact, a few days later, I was bicycling down Bond Street when I spotted Melvyn Bragg on the pavement and leapt off to greet him with the unusual opening, "What's this about your knee, Melvyn?" He grasped his leg with remembered agony and said: "Yes, I should never be playing football at my age..."

Which brings us to last Friday, when I purchased a copy of my local paper, the Bath Chronicle, and found chilling evidence of the continuing damage wreaked by sport. The front-page story was an inquest on a local amateur rugby player who was paralysed after a tackle in a game, and died less than a year later of a massive blood clot. On the back page, the sports page, there were two stories. One was about a Bath swimmer who has been forced by fatigue to withdraw from the Commonwealth Games, and the lead sports story was about the Bath rugby team's mammoth casualty list of 12 players. With more than a month until the season begins, the manager, Jack Rowell, thinks that 10 likely first-team regulars will not be fit in time for selection. Good old sport. Even in the close season it does you harm, it seems.

But the coverage of Bath rugby does not end there. There is an almighty fuss going on at the moment over the status of the Bath rugby ground. This is situated on a huge stretch of green in central Bath called the Recreation Ground, or Rec, which was given in a covenant many years ago to the people of Bath for their pleasure and recreation. The rugby club has been permitted to build their present pitch on it, but now wants to expand mightily. The covenant would seem to be an obstacle to this, so Bath Rugby plc wants the covenant legally tested, which would cost £120,000. The cost is being put up, not by the club, who would stand to benefit, but by Bath and North-East Somerset Council, who currently control Bath, and the Bath Chronicle has been flooded by letters of protest from people who can see no reason why £120,000 of rate-payers' money is being used to whittle away the recreational rights of those very rate-payers.

"It's about time that B&NES stopped sucking up to Bath Rugby plc," wrote the splendidly named letter-writer John Gates-Mutton Snr on Friday. "Why are Bath Rugby plc and B&NES so desperate to see the stadium built on the people's recreation ground? Common sense tells us that this is a wrong siting. Perhaps there is a more sensitive reason why B&NES are keen that Bath Rugby plc should remain at the Recreation Ground?"

It is not clear what John Gates-Mutton Snr is driving at here. Everyone in Bath knows that B&NES is sensitive. Why, only the other day there was a memo circulated in the council asking council workers not to use the acronym BANES, which sounded so negative (even though it is their name). But he cannot mean that. Does he mean – perish the thought – that B&NES and Bath Rugby have some sort of cosy relationship behind the scenes?

I would never entertain such a preposterous idea. And if I did, I would hide behind a pseudonym before I uttered it.

Something unlikely and undetectable. Such as "John Gates-Mutton Snr", for instance.

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