Injuries in testing

[dt]

So a friend that I met a few years ago while rock climbing was telling me a story about when he was a tester in Dallas back in 2018. He was testing what I think is called the bouncing spider (obstacle that you go through a spider wall, drop down on to a trampoline, then bounce up and grab onto a cylinder). When he dropped from the spider walk onto the trampoline, he shattered his leg because I guess the trampoline may have been too tight or something. His bone was literally STICKING OUT OF HIS SHIN.. I just couldn’t believe that after that type of occurrence in testing that they would use the obstacle on the show. So I was just wondering, does anyone know if injuries are a common occurrence in testing? Like obviously they are TESTING it and making adjustments for safety, I just became curious if major injuries like that were commonplace

[Philip]

Definitely not common, but anything involving moving your body will inherently have an injury risk

[Ben Baker]

Yeah I’ve never heard of many injuries happening. Seems like someone got hurt on the same obstacle in the episode.

[azn]

I know Magnus Midtbø (Team Europe member for USA vs. The World 6) cut himself in the face attempting Slingshot when he broke the bar and it hit him. It's actually on his YouTube Channel.

link

As mentioned above though, there is always an injury risk, but this was the only testing injury I knew prior to the story you told, so in that aspect I can assume that injuries aren't commonplace.

[dt]

Interesting, I had forgotten about Magnus getting hurt. Well I am glad there at least aren’t that many known injuries. Hopefully my friend’s story is the worst. I almost threw up thinking about how painful that would have been

[penguincatfish]

The shin splitting out of the leg reminds me of a big story back in 2013 with college basketball player Kevin Ware.

During an Elite Eight game, he jumped slightly sideways, landed, and his leg split. This happened live on CBS.

Couple of recent pieces about Ware -

thespun.com/acc/louisville/kevin-ware-update-what-happened-broken-leg
fanbuzz.com/college-basketball/kevin-ware-now/

Reports said it might've been caused by undetected stress fractures - abcnews.go.com/Health/kevin-wares-broken-leg-possibly-caused-undetected-stress/story?id=18854412

Article about how CBS covered it when it happened - www.mic.com/articles/32491/kevin-ware-injury-coverage-did-cbs-handle-it-appropriately

There's also a Medium article that has a picture of the injury right at the top. Not linking it because it's gross.

[DeAndre]

A lot of injuries have happened over the course of testing / competing in ANW. Aside from the obvious ones like Travis breaking his ankle on the Double Dipper, Sean Bryan on the Jumping Spider, Magnus on Slingshot and Drew on Wingnut Alley that one year, here are some I remember:

In the course mentioned in the first post of this thread, the Dallas 2018 one, the Tuning Forks destroyed one of the female athletes' legs (IIRC April Steiner Bennett during qualis - as she had to be hospitalised they just pushed the next woman up) in Qualifying which is why they were hesitant to use it during finals for the course-swap, I guess.

Then, there's Nate Burkhalter. He and some other guy hyperextended their achilles tendon on the jump to the swing surfer wall during testing I also believe in 2018, which led to the crew adding a pad to the wall. He jumped and from the insta video it seems his back leg unintentionally slammed toe first into the wall and his leg just continued forward, causing the damage. There was another guy as well - he wasn't the only one to have gotten injured by that.

ANW is flat out dangerous lol. Unless it's just gentle traversing of ninja holds, anything lache/jump/dynamic can pretty much kill ya.

[subtleagent]

Brian Kretsch breaking his leg on the Tilting Table in ANW 7 counts no? Funny how the SASUKE 11 Balance Bridge goes from being super easy to being one of the most dangerous obstacles in ANW history. IIRC it injured two others, so I can only give it so much leeway.