Lindsey Davies: Q&A - Royal College of Physicians

London 2012 Olympics
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‘When I was at school I enjoyed sports. If I were a journalist I would have
been a sports journalist or a sports photographer’
The London 2012 Olympic Games will be big.
The Athletes’ Village in the Olympic Park will
host around 17,000 athletes and officials, and
the Games will feature 26 sports at venues in
the Olympic Park, across London and outside
of the city. The Olympic Flame will travel
around the UK for 70 days before arriving
in London the weekend before the Games.
There will be street parties and celebrations
– the 2012 Olympics will be an historic event
for the city. Commentary starts a six-issue
countdown to London 2012 with an interview
with Dr Ian McCurdie, chief medical officer,
Team GB.
What were the highlights of being
Q part of the Beijing Olympics
I don’t think we anticipated winning
A so many medals and doing quite as
well. Before Beijing we set a target to get
fourth in the medal table in London and on
the last Friday in Beijing we were third, but
then Russia won a couple of golds over the
weekend and we finished fourth.
Beijing was so big. The Olympic festival
is massive but Beijing was huge in terms
of buildings and numbers – the venues
were spectacular. That and our team’s
performance were the highlights.
As an Olympic doctor did you feel
Q that you shared in the success of the
British team
Yes, as part of one big team. We had
A 311 athletes in Beijing and around
200 support staff from coaches, managers,
physios and others. The biggest impact on
sports performance is illness or injury. If
an athlete gets injured in the run up to the
Games that could be the end of their Olympic
hopes. There is only so much that you can
do to restore full function after injury, so you
need to try to prevent athletes from getting
injured. This is a challenge in the last weeks
of training.
But the thing that is eminently preventable
is illness. Illness in one athlete or the squad
can have a massive impact on the team’s
performance. From injury you might lose
one rower in a boat, but from illness you
could lose them all. I don’t mean bird flu
like we had in the lead up to Beijing; there
is always something brewing, like in Sydney
we had a potential seasonal flu epidemic.
Even a snivelly nose, a cough or cold, for an
Olympic athlete can take the edge off their
performance and stop them achieving 100%.
Part of the overall medical provision is to
keep people in optimum health – not just the
athletes, but also the people around them.
Do Olympic athletes live inside a
Q bubble at the Games
That is exactly the phrase that
A people use, ‘the bubble’. It is mainly
a security bubble, but you are literally in a
different world.
What steps can you take to make
Q sure an Olympic athlete doesn’t
catch a cold
Most of it is educational, but there are
A certain practical steps to take. In Beijing
we issued every athlete their own hand gel
dispenser and there were automatic hand
gel dispensers outside every accommodation
block. The dining hall is the central hub of any
Olympic village. Around 15,000 people lived
in the Olympic village in Beijing and they all
ate in one place – a self-service canteen with
everything from salads and healthy food to
fast food. It was free and open 24 hours a day
– unlimited food of any variety 24/7, which in
itself was a potential problem. The dining hall
produced around 60,000 meals a day and
you had people from 205 different countries
picking up cutlery from trays and bread rolls.
The potential risk of spreading bugs was
huge, education and using hand gel was vital.
All the athletes coming into the village
would get briefed about security and where
things are. As a doctor I would talk to them
about hydration, hand gel and keeping clean.
Image©Shutterstock
I used this phrase that my grandmother
would say: ‘Coughs and sneezes spread
diseases’. If athletes felt unwell, they were
encouraged to report symptoms early.
So what are the challenges of
Q working with athletes compared to
regular people
Small things make big differences –
A that’s the key. The differences between
success and failure for an Olympic athlete
are minute. Anything that takes the edge
off performance is crucial and you have to
understand the importance of that if you are
looking after these people. There is no margin
for error or compromise.
There is a lovely statistic from the Athens
2004 Olympics about the difference between
winning gold and silver. In Athens we won
gold in the coxless four [rowing event] with
Steven Redgrave, Kelly Holmes won two
golds in the 800-metre and 1,500-metre run,
Chris Hoy won a gold in the kilometre, and
the mens’ 4x100-metre relay won one gold.
If you take these five races and look at the
difference in time between winning a gold or
a silver, the sum of those times is just over half
a second. Across five events, the difference
between winning gold and silver was half a
second. That’s how close it is. If we were half
a second slower that would have been five
silvers.
How did your years of working with
Q the British army and the Royal Ballet
prepare you for being an Olympic doctor
I was a doctor in the army for 23 years
A and looked after soldiers. Soldiers need
to be physically fit and robust to do their job.
If they are ill or unfit then they are not fully
functional. So the concept of being a doctor
to try and improve people’s physical function
to return them to high levels of activity was
something I grew up with in my medical
career. As you might imagine, working in the
army has lots of parallels with working for
the Olympics. The idea of sport and exercise
medicine (SEM) and military medicine, or
www.rcplondon.ac.uk n June 2011 n Commentary 19