The Olympic athletes make their record-breaking feats look easy, but doctors warn, “Do not try this at home.”
Medical experts say they have seen people injured — sometimes severely — after being inspired to try something they saw during the 2024 Summer Olympics.
“We frequently see people come to physiotherapy [after] watching the Olympics and either revisiting a sport they have previously participated in, or inspired to take up something new and are unfortunately affected by an injury during this activity,” Matthew Harrison, an NHS physiotherapist and spokesperson for the Chartered Society of Physiotherapy, told The Guardian.
“I recently saw a woman who had significant pain and luckily no fracture of her shoulder following being lifted up and dropped after being inspired by the women’s rugby, where players are lifted up to catch the high balls,” Harrison told the outlet.
He also shared that he saw a man with a broken wrist who was inspired to give skateboardinganother try.
Attempting sports like gymnastics can result in even more significant injuries, he cautioned.
“A backflip is a wonderful thing to watch for those who have practiced for many years, but can be dangerous if this is new to you,” Harrison told The Guardian. “Landing on your head is never a good thing.”
While someone like Suni Lee or Simone Bilesmay make a backflip look easy, an at-home attempt “could result in catastrophic or even fatal injury,” Dr. Tim Exell, a senior lecturer in biomechanics and rehabilitation science at the University of Portsmouth told the outlet.
He continued: “These are all elite athletes in peak physical condition…If you see someone pole-vaulting over a bar and think: ‘Oh, great, I can have a go at that,’ that’s much riskier. You need an awful lot of control over how your body’s moving in the air, and if you’re dropping from six, seven metres in the air on to a mat, but do it wrong and land on your neck, then that’s going to result in a pretty horrific injury.”
While most experts agreed that it’s great to be inspired by the athletes at the Olympics, they all stressed that their feats are the results of years of training — and even with all that training, these elite athletes can fall.
“On a day-to-day basis, athletes will eat, sleep, train, repeat,” Dean Sutton, a strength and conditioning coach at Pure Sports Medicine, told The Guardian.
“Us mere mortals just won’t have time to do this as we have to do a full-time job and have life commitments.”
