Discussion: What causes MTBO injuries

IOF has a new article on What causes MTBO injuries. Basically, the reason appears to be falling off your bike. :-)

Does the Scientific Journal of Orienteering still exist? It had a treasure-trove of research that suggests the majority of injuries to foot-orienteers, occur to the ankles.

https://orienteering.sport/iof/publications/scient...

A miracle that I could find it on the IOF's new cloud, but there you go. Last issue was apparently in 2014.

Shamefully I'm one of the 45 injury cases reported during that period.

@tRicky - only 1?

Yeah just the broken nose. I did my other major injuries off MTBO courses.

So training for MTBO is more dangerous that the race?

There used to be an injury of the month item in the "Australian Orienteer". But when MTBO started the editor couldn't get the issues out fast enough to keep up with the injuries.

@gruver Yes, it would be most interesting to see more research on orienteering injuries, but sadly safety appears to be out of focus at international level

We only had one broken leg at the trials on the weekend. I think there were other injuries but most of them were psychological in nature.

Don't tell me - the kids are upset about you still beating them?

One of my worst orienteering injuries was on a mountain bike. But it was an unusual case: any form of self-powered transportation was allowed, and it was on a frozen lake. First I did it with spiked shoes, and that worked pretty well. Then I gave it a second try with ice skates, but there was too much drifted snow and I had to give up. My third run was on the bike, and I went down hard a number of times on the open ice, resulting in tremendous bruising. The bike would have been fantastic with spiked tires, though.

simmo = ah no!

@sandor Yes but not the lightweight stuff that used to be in the SJO. I suspect the system that rewards academics by number of papers published:-))

@gruver I think that currently our understanding of orienteering injuries is so vague that practically any data would greatly improve it.

We started the MTBO Injury Database together with the MTBO Athletes Commission when I was Chair of the MTBO Commission. The short "paper" published on the data collected over 7 years already puts things into a very different perspective compared to "common knowledge".