12.20 Concussion in professional team sports: time for a harmonised approach?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Objective Concussion in sport raises two serious concerns. First, concussion carries a public health risk, given that athletes are regularly exposed to the risk of sustaining concussion. Secondly, sports federations are exposed to the risk of financial and reputational damage as a consequence of legal proceedings being filed against them. My thesis examines how to reduce these two-fold risks, and proposes a harmonised solution across sports and legal systems. Design My thesis relies upon doctrinal research and comparative law methods. Its backbone consists of case studies, which describe and analyse the current regulation of concussion. Setting The case studies focus on selected professional team sports and countries: United States (American football, hockey, football, water polo, baseball); Canada (Canadian football); Australia (rugby, Australian Rules football); Switzerland (football, hockey); England and Brazil (football). Scope My thesis focuses on professional team sports, excluding elite and grassroots sports, as well as individual sports. Interventions/Outcome Measures The measures taken by sports federations can be divided into six categories: the rules of play, rules of the game and concussion management protocols, financial support for injured athletes, education, research and data collection. The measures taken by governments include legislative interventions and guidelines, other congressional and parliamentary interventions, education, research and data collection. Main Results While sports federations and governments have made notable regulatory efforts, opportunities for further improvement exist. Current efforts are taking place within a framework that is still too often opaque, conflictive, defensive and self-centered. Harmonised reforms appear urgently necessary, given the ongoing nature of the concussion controversy across countries and sports, and the need for sport to operate internationally. The proposed reforms, inspired by the anti-doping system, consist of an international standard, an international convention, a new international sports safety body and some limited enforcement mechanisms.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.078 | 0.087 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.033 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.028 | 0.024 |
| Open science | 0.008 | 0.017 |
| Research integrity | 0.016 | 0.017 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".