CTE is a frightening thing. But banning risky sports isn’t the answer

There’s a particular species of person who seems to have decided that the chief problem with human existence is that some of us insist on enjoying it.

This week, the focus of some turned toward AFL football when the ABC’s Four Corners program looked at the life and death of Nick Lowden, who died aged 23 in 2023 and was the youngest footballer diagnosed with chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE).

Dr Ann McKee, of the CTE Centre of Boston University, opined that in effect, body-contact Australian rules football should be prohibited for everyone under 18 years, such is the magnitude of brain injury risks associated with repeated player-on-player collisions, including those that don’t manifest in concussion.

Prohibited. Abolished. Switch off the lights and herd thousands of minors towards something safer.

I understand the impulse. CTE, is a dreadful thing, and the science linking it to repeated head knocks isn’t fiction. Watching Four Corners last Monday night made for grim viewing. One must accept – as have the AFL and NRL – the nexus between sport-related head trauma, and the onset of CTE.

But be careful with that science. Reported figures concerning the prevalence of detection of CTE in brains dissected in research institutions carry an obvious selection bias. Unless a much wider cross-section of society donate their brains for the same research post-mortem, how can it be known as to the prevalence of people suffering from CTE who have never played contact sport?

Plus, the impact of genetic predisposition and other societal factors is not properly understood.

Anyone who has watched a once-luminous sportsperson dim into confusion at the age of 60 has felt the cold hand of it all. I’m not here to wave that away. What I am here to do is to suggest that the “This Activity Carries Risk, Therefore Ban It” approach isn’t an argument.

It’s a reflex that, chased to its logical terminus, renders us all perched in padded rooms eating steamed vegetables and waiting politely to die of nothing in particular.

Here’s the first problem with abolitionism: Where, precisely, does the barricade go? Because once you’ve established the principle that society may abolish a pursuit because it damages the brains of consenting adults who have chosen to do it, you have not just banned AFL, you have banned a category of activity. And that category is enormous.

Boxing, with which I have a particular familiarity in capacity as chairman of the Combat Sports Authority of NSW, would obviously be gone. Rugby league, gone. Mixed martial arts, very much gone.

But why stop at heads? In my view, the most dangerous professional sport is thoroughbred racing. Mountaineering kills people every season – by some reports, there are 300 unrecovered corpses above the “Death Zone” on Mount Everest. Ban them, too?

The honest abolitionist must either ban all of it, or admit they’re not actually operating a principle but rather a vibe. They have decided that some risks feel acceptable and others feel icky, and are dressing that preference up in the language of public health.

It’s the same instinct that might agitate for the banning of various forms of hunting, while leaving fishing untouched in the same way many “vegetarians” make exceptions when it comes to seafood. The cruelty, of course, is identical.

The second problem is that bans don’t abolish things. Instead, they have the effect of abolishing the supervised, regulated, version of the activity and replacing it with a worse one, performed in the Stygian depths.

If one outlaws contact and collision sports, you don’t produce a nation of gentler souls playing touch footy in the park. Instead, you produce underground leagues which are unregulated and uninsured, which have no concussion protocols, no independent doctors, no graduated return-to-play rules, and no governing body with the resources to fund the research that might actually save brains.

The professional sports codes, for all their collective mis-steps, remain the place where the safety improvements are most likely to happen. Under governance structures is where the rules get changed; the effectiveness of concussion monitoring gets studied.

Which brings me to the third, and largest, problem – the matter of permitting people to make their own decisions about their own skulls. This is the bit the abolitionists find genuinely intolerable, because at its heart their argument isn’t really about safety at all.

It’s about the conviction that they know better than you, about what you should be allowed to want. The 16 or 17-year-old AFL footballer is a child in a legal sense, but life isn’t as simple as that. One apprehends the AFL player of that age isn’t coerced. Maybe he or she has spent their entire life pursuing this thing with a single-mindedness the rest of us reserve for lunch, fully aware, that getting repeatedly belted is part of the deal.

The Gillick doctrine is a law principle establishing that a child under 16 can consent to medical treatment without parental knowledge or approval provided he or she has sufficient maturity and intelligence to fully understand what is proposed. A child so assessed is said to be “Gillick competent.”

At law and applying the Gillick principle, competence is decision-specific where capacity is assessed against the particular decision’s gravity, so more complex or serious choices demand greater understanding.

To tell a 16 or 17-year-old player that the activity giving their life shape and meaning must be erased for his own good isn’t compassion but paternalism. It treats a free citizen as a ward of the state, and it does so on the unspoken assumption that a life lived a bit longer and a lot more blandly is the superior life.

None of which means we do nothing. That’s the false binary the abolitionists rely on; that one either bans the sport entirely or shrugs and lets people scramble their brains for our amusement. Rubbish. There’s a vast, sensible middle ground, and it is precisely where every sophisticated policy actually lives.

You can mandate concussion stand-downs. You can change tackle laws and police them properly. You can fund research, run mandatory protocols, compensate the injured handsomely, and make absolutely certain that every kid signing a contract understands exactly what he is signing up for.

You can, in short, do the difficult and expensive work of making a dangerous thing as safe as it can be made, while still being the thing. What you can’t do is reach for the detonator switch because the hard work is actually HARD. Banning is what you do when you have run out of either ideas or patience, and want the moral credit anyway.

I wrote in 2025 about Will Pucovski, a cricketer of rare gifts forced out at 27 by concussion, and about the genuine scandal that professional athletes in this country fall through a hole in our workers’ compensation laws that no nightclub bouncer ever would.

That’s a real problem, and it deserves real fury. But the answer to it wasn’t to ban the bowling of a cricket ball.

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