By Jennifer Hardes Dvorak

I stepped into a Taekwondo dojang the year I moved to Canada to pursue my PhD studies. As an international student, I was new to the country without any family or friends, and what began as a means of staying active and finding my place in a community soon became a core part of my everyday life. The dojang became my home from home – the Grandmaster a parental figure, and my training partners were friends who felt like family. The discipline and routine complemented my doctoral work, with writing and research scheduled around three hours of daily training.

As my involvement grew, I was invited to train with the team at weekends, and I soon began sparring and competing myself. Taekwondo became a central part of my life alongside doctoral study, to the point that I attended my doctoral examination battered, bruised and sleep-deprived after spending the previous day testing for my black belt, a gruelling examination that had begun with an overnight stay on the dojang floor. To say I loved the sport was an understatement; it was a core part of my identity.

It was not abnormal to turn up to training for body conditioning – we would don a hogu (chest protector) and proceed to kick each other repeatedly to condition our bodies to give and receive blows. Head shots were a core part of training and sparring too –  the roundhouse kick wrapping around the side of the head, the axe kick to the face. Feeling sore or injured was a normal part of the practice.

What strikes me now is not that these injuries occurred but how unremarkable they were at the time. Injuries were accepted as part of participation; they were evidence of commitment, perseverance, and sometimes even pride. I never asked whether these harms should occur because I didn’t consider them harms in that sense of the word; they were simply part of the practice. Looking back, though, I find myself asking a question that never occurred to me then: why do we accept harm in sport?

That question has taken on new significance as an academic working across medical law and ethics, prompting me to return to these experiences from a different perspective. Recent class action lawsuits such as the NFL Concussion Injury Litigation and the ongoing Various Claimants v World Rugby, alongside growing public attention to an expanding evidence base concerning the long-term effects of repetitive head impacts (RHIs), have intensified concern about sporting harm. Athletes, clinicians, parents, coaches, researchers and policymakers are increasingly asking questions about concussion, neurological injury and institutional responsibility.

My interest in these questions is shaped not only by medical law and ethics but also by my background in sociology. Sport-related concussion is often framed as a matter of individual choice – as a risk knowingly accepted by participants. Yet, as C. Wright Mills famously argued, some issues are too structured, patterned and socially significant to be understood merely as ‘personal troubles’; instead, they are better framed as ‘public issues’ – systemic problems shaped by cultures, institutions and governance structures. Sport-related harm is not, then, simply about individual athletes making risky choices, but about how sporting institutions organise, legitimise and distribute those risks.

This is where my JME article comes in. To date, responses to sport-related concussion have been focused ‘downstream’; RHIs and related neurological injuries are problems to manage through education, regulation or medical oversight, such as better player safety protocols, risk management, and return to play guidelines. When legal remedies are sought, they tend to emerge after the fact through negligence claims that face considerable evidential and doctrinal obstacles.

Despite being important, these interventions obscure a more fundamental question – that is, why are some forms of foreseeable harm in sport accepted in the first place? This question is particularly pressing in relation to RHIs in contact sports, where the devastating consequences may emerge years after participation in the form of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. In fact, many athletes who love sport are those who have been involved in the large class action lawsuits seeking remedy for the harms that emerge later in life from RHIs sustained during participation, risks that were often downgraded by sports organisations or so culturally embedded that they came to be seen as ‘normal’ and accepted – part of the fabric of the game itself.

My article asks why some forms of foreseeable harm are treated as acceptable while others are not. As evidence of the long-term effects of RHIs unfolds, assumptions that perhaps once seemed obvious deserve closer scrutiny. What social, political, economic goods do sports bring that might justify the continued tolerance of sport-related harm? Who bears the risks of neurological injury in sport and are these risks evenly distributed across the population? What responsibilities do sporting institutions have when harms are foreseeable?

This is not to suggest that sport is not valuable – far from it. These questions arise precisely because sport appears to be so valuable. Sport is woven into our cultural fabric. It is embedded, even mandated in some respects, through PE and school sport. However, this elevated status of sport also requires elevated public justification. It is because sport matters so much and so deeply to many people that we must collectively and publicly confront not only questions about how its harms should be managed and mitigated, but also the more fundamental question of under what conditions those harms can be publicly justified.

Paper title:  Is sport in the public interest? Towards a legal and ethical framework for justifying sport-related harm.

Author: Jennifer Hardes Dvorak

Affiliation: Law, Canterbury Christ Church University

Competing interests: None to declare