Chewed up, spat out

Tuesday 7 April 2009, 22:00 GMT

By Riath Al-Samarrai

It's the second week of leg four, the wind is low and the sea is choppy. Anders Dahlsjo is working in the pit of Ericsson 3 when suddenly the boom breaks free of a line and slams against his head. He's out cold.

When he comes round he's in Richard Mason's "no mercy medical clinic", blood trickling from his head. Mason cleans the wound and glues it shut before returning to his day job.

A few days earlier, Mason, the onboard medic, used forceps to pull out a mashed thumbnail from Magnus Olsson's throbbing hand. Olsson then returned to skipper the boat, a position he has held since Anders Lewander tore the medial meniscus in his left knee in leg three. Mason went on to suffer a prolapsed disc in his back, ruling him out of leg five.

Across the ocean on PUMA, Ken Read is staring at a grotesquely mangled and bloodied index finger after it got jammed in a titanium block. Grimacing in pain, Telefonica Blue's Bouwe Bekking is close to fainting after tearing a buttock muscle. Watching from home is PUMA's Chris Nicholson, two screws embedded in his right knee after tearing his anterior cruciate ligament in the second leg.

Never before have the pre-start words of Neal McDonald, a Green Dragon watch captain, seemed more apt. "These boats just chew people up and spit them out," he said in Alicante. "They can be pretty nasty."

Polly Gough is agreeing in between answering emails. She's been a nurse and a rower for England, but in her current role as race medical co-ordinator sports injuries have been taken to a new extreme. "It has been busy at times," she says. "Those boats can be pretty dangerous."

The understatement is underlined by some figures.

In the first five legs approximately 500 emails went between her duty office, the medical team and the boats as crews sought and discussed advice in dealing with the range of injuries you can obtain on an overpowered, undermanned boat.

More pertinently, the medical questionnaires filled out anonymously by all crew members at the end of each of those legs painted a more vivid picture of the health situation on a Volvo Open 70.

In the opening leg from Alicante to Cape Town, which spanned 23 sailing days from departure to the last arrival, there were no fewer than 137 issues recalled by the 88 sailors. They ranged from seven head or face injuries to five fungal infections to nine mouth ulcers to the evacuation of Tony Mutter from Ericsson 4 because of a knee infection.

"The first leg certainly saw the highest number of issues," Gough said. "People are new to these boats, some crews have had more time to practice and familiarise themselves than others."

Read, talking at the time, said: "When the competition starts for real, there's a new intensity onboard. There's less throttling back and as a consequence we are getting fire hosed all over the place. People getting washed down the deck by waves, bashing into the rig, the winches. It takes a while to learn the safest way to work on these boats. It's tough."

The second stage, encompassing the cold and wet of the Southern Ocean and the hot and moist air of the Doldrums, saw the fleet travel to India. The 18 days of sailing yielded 84 health complaints, including, among others, a kettle burn, haemorrhoids, three cases of seasickness and 19 reports of skin problems and sores.

"I couldn't believe how violently these boats move, day and night," said Team Russia's Oleg Zherebtsov after his first ever leg. "You are always tired and vulnerable."

The third stage to Singapore produced 69 issues from 10 days, while the fourth was another reminder that these boats are not toys. After two boats retired because of severe storm damage en route to China, Ericsson 3 suspended racing. Considering the absence from the leg of Team Russia, it left just four teams (44 sailors) to fill out the questionnaire, with 20 issues being reported in 13 sailing days. There was even a report of a kidney infection.

With just five boats sailing leg five, there were still 48 reported issues, including two broken ribs and a mouth ulcer caused by a bitten lip.

In all, that's 349 reported issues in 107 sailing days. Alternatively put, that's an average of more than three issues a day across the fleet.

The biggest culprit among a huge list of problems is, predictably, the category of infected skin and sores, appearing 59 times on the questionnaires for the first five legs.

"It's not great for the skin," Gough said. "It's constantly damp, big changes in temperatures. It's easy to get an irritation and for it to spread."

But it's also easy to mangle a finger. Or tear a muscle. Or suffer concussion. Or break a rib. The numbers tell that much.

Of course, it is impossible to understand fully why these people choose to endure all this. But one thing is for certain, as McDonald said, "these boats are not for the faint hearted".

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