Beijing 2008 beckons—let the politics begin

Article Outline

• Copyright

The 2008 Olympic Games are just around the corner, and another 4-year cycle is about to come to a peak. As the Olympic hype starts to ramp up, so does the associated media reporting and, inevitably controversial issues will be raised. Politics has always been inextricably linked with sport. The Chinese boycotted the Olympic Games from 1956 until the winter Games in 1980 in protest of the IOC decision to recognise Taiwan. Additionally, in the 1956 Melbourne games, Switzerland, Spain and the Netherlands boycotted because of the Soviet crackdown in Hungary. Egypt, Iraq and Lebanon also stayed away in protest of Israel's invasion of the Sinai Peninsula. In the Montreal Games of ‘76, 26 countries boycotted the Games in protest at the inclusion of New Zealand, whose rugby union side had recently played against South Africa, a nation that had been banned from competing at Olympic Games since 1964. The height of the cold war saw the USA team boycott Moscow in 1980. These are just a few of many examples that litter the history of ‘the greatest show on earth’. When China was awarded the 2008 Games back in 2001 there was debate, certainly in the British media, whether China deserved this world show case given their human rights record at that time. Since this announcement, all has been relatively quiet, until now. There have been no announcements of boycotts yet at the time of writing this. However, the British Olympic Authority has recently been criticised in an attempt to make their athletes sign a gagging clause preventing them from talking on political issues. This has since been revoked. Also this week, the film director Steven Spielberg has withdrawn from his position as artistic adviser to the 2008 Games in protest of China's policy on the conflict in Darfur.

I hope these recent incidents do not indicate the tip of the iceberg. Looking back at some of the previous examples of boycotts and protests, the world has since moved on, and I would suggest that no boycott has been pivotal in bringing about this change. Sport has the amazing capacity to unite athletes and nations and bring them together. Sport also has the capacity to transcend all political and religious issues. Athletes and their support teams have been working for 4 years for an event that will, for many, be the pinnacle in their careers. Whilst politicians may want to hijack a prestigious event such as the Olympic Games for their own political ends, most athletes will just want to arrive in Beijing fit and healthy and ready to put in the performance of their lives. No more, no less.

Good luck to all those athletes taking part and not forgetting the teams behind them—enjoy Beijing.

Onto this issue, many outcome scores currently exist for the evaluation of foot and ankle pain. In this issue, Eechaute and co-workers describe the development and clinimetric properties of a new questionnaire, the Chronic Ankle Instability Scale (CAIS), designed specifically for the evaluation of this clinical entity. Some readers may not be familiar with the term ‘clinimetric’, indeed, you will not find it in the dictionary or indexed in Wikipedia. Feinstein first coined this phrase in 1982 and defined the term as ‘the domain concerned with indexes, rating scales and other expressions that are used to describe or measure symptoms, physical signs, and other distinctly clinical phenomena in clinical medicine’. The test–retest reliability, content validity and internal consistency of the new scale are reported, and the authors conclude that the CAIS is a valid and reliable instrument to assess subjects with this condition. Herrington and colleagues present a report on the effect of a repeated tackling task on the shoulder joint position sense (JPS) in a group of professional rugby union players. Interestingly, a reduction in joint position sense was found but only at the outer range. Any joint, and specifically the shoulder joint, is more at risk from injury at the outer range, and if the JPS is affected following fatigue, this may further increase the injury risk.

The relationship between available passive hip rotation and the presence of low back pain (LBP) in sports requiring rotational movement of the trunk and hips, such as racquetball and tennis, continues to be of interest to clinicians. Van Dillen and colleagues investigated 24 subjects with, and 24 subjects without LBP and the former demonstrated less total hip rotation and more asymmetry, with the left hip being more restricted than the right. Much has been written on the incidence of LBP in elite male cricket fast bowlers, however little has been written on their female counterparts. Stuelcken and colleagues reported 54% of the 26 female bowlers included in this study had a history of LBP. No bowler reported being out of cricket for more than 4 weeks with an acute episode, and this would suggest that acute lumbar stress injuries suffered in male bowlers are not prevalent in this group. Additionally, a significant difference in lumbar lateral flexion range of motion was reported to the bowling arm side between those female fast bowlers with and without a history of LBP. In the penultimate article of this issue Whatman and colleagues investigated the effect of 3 different protocols, namely hamstring stretches, hamstring vibration, and a combination of stretches and vibration on dynamic knee range of movement and jump performance in a small group of healthy male participants. None of the protocols had an effect on jump performance, however, the stretching protocol did have a small, but short-lived effect on knee range of movement. Finally, Button and colleagues present some original research evaluating specific kinematic variables in copers and non-copers following ACL rupture. Interestingly, mean knee angle was still significantly greater at 4 months in the non-coping group, and had failed to recover to the same extent as knee flexion angle in the coping group.

That concludes the original research for this issue, don’t forget to read the reviews on the latest books and the diary of forthcoming events at the end. Any readers wishing to add to the diary events are welcome to e-mail these to the editor. We hope you enjoy this issue of Physical Therapy in Sport.