Winter Sports - Football
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Most sport in Canada is on artificial turf, primarily due to the extreme climate. It would be very difficult to ensure solid natural grass pitches at all venues
Jerome Valcke, FIFA General Secretary
USA were starting to ban the tyres from being disposed of in landfills, and there was a massive build up of used tyres above ground. Ingenious it may be, but only if you discount the fact that the tyres were banned from landfills because of the nasty chemicals that they contain.
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A bit confusing then, that they decided to increase the surface area of these potentially carcinogenic ingredients by crumbling them up and putting them into pitches to be used by anyone - from small children to professional athletes. These days, the synthetic turf industry recycles one twelfth of the 300 million auto tyres that are withdrawn from use each year. Four chemicals found in the tyre crumbs have been labelled carcinogens by the International Agency for Cancer Research (IARC), including carbon black, which makes up 20-40% of the synthetic infill. To make matters worse, studies have shown that, as temperatures rise, the rubber crumbs emit more volatile chemicals and, as we have seen, the temperatures of these synthetic pitches can reach high levels. Although the Synthetic Turf Council maintains that these synthetic pitches do not pose any threat to athletes, there have been worrying observations of suspicious groupings of cancer cases in goalies exposed on a regular basis to synthetic pitches.
Last year, Amy Griffin, head soccer coach for the University of Washington, began to question whether it was the chemicals in the rubber crumb in synthetic turf that were making goalies that she had coached, as well as goalies internationally, develop cancer. Goalkeepers, whose bodies are in constant contact with the turf, can get the rubber crumbs from the turf into their cuts and scrapes, as well as in their mouths. “I’ve coached for twenty-seven years. My first
82 I PC AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2015
It’s an economic issue rather than a legal one. The Women’s World Cup is loss-making. It requires a hefty cross-subsidy from the men’s event
Matthew Syed, Sports Correspondent, The Times
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fifteen years, I never heard anything about this. All of a sudden it seems to be in a stream of kids,” Griffin says. She has since compiled a list of thirty-eight American soccer players - thirty-four of whom are goalies - who have been diagnosed with cancer. Blood cancers such as lymphoma and leukemia dominate the list.
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Dr Davis Lee of the Synthetic Turf Council responded to these observations; “We’ve got fourteen studies on our website that say we can find no negative health effects.” Although they aren’t “absolutely conclusive,” he says; “There’s certainly a preponderance of evidence, to this point, that says, in fact, it is safe.”
But Nancy Alderman, president of the nonprofit public health group Environmental and Human Health, has huge reservations. She says of the predominance of blood cancer; “Whenever you see a preponderance of one kind of cancer, that’s when you worry. Goalies are ‘in the stuff’ all the time, so they are actually more exposed than the other players.” When speaking of the matter, Connecticut state toxicologist David Brown said to Alderman, “Oh my god, we really have to look into this - I know what’s in tyres.” He also says of the studies that have been conducted so far, that there “is no study with sufficient sample sizes to determine the potential hazard.” We must not blame FIFA, or any of the other organisations and governing bodies that have installed synthetic pitches, for the health concerns raised of late, as there is obviously a lot more research to be done on the matter. But why did FIFA and the Canadian Soccer Association decide that synthetics were the way to go for the Women’s World Cup this year? It has a lot to do with the weather conditions, apparently, although we at Pitchcare believe that the
The pitches in Scotland are terrible. It's much better to play on an artificial surface than to play on a natural turf surface
Ronny Deila, Manager, Celtic Football Club
host nation could quite easily cultivate and maintain six grass pitches over the two month period of the tournament. In fact Moncton, the venue that saw England and France play their first game of the tournament, already had a grass field, which was taken up and replaced with synthetic turf before the tournament began. The 3G pitch will give way to natural turf again when the tournament ends.
FIFA General Secretary, Jerome Valcke, disagrees with this: “Most sporting infrastructure in Canada is on artificial turf, primarily due to the extreme climate. It would be very difficult to ensure solid natural grass pitches at all venues.” FIFA claims that the quality of the game is decidedly better on an artificial pitch than a poorly maintained natural pitch, but then, it would be expected at
high level football that the pitches would be well maintained, wouldn’t it? Surely, the money would have been put into natural turf installation and maintenance for the men’s tournament if an issue like this were to arise, as the campaigners of the lawsuit highlighted. It would certainly have been expensive to install grass pitches at the Canadian venues, and as journalist Matthew Syed of The Times points out; “the problem with ‘equality’ in sport is often, at the
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