Numbers don't lie?

"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics" Benjamin Disraeli

Despite their outwardly concrete status, anyone who has studied maths beyond a GCSE standard will be able to tell you that statistics very rarely tell a full story. Instead, they can be manipulated and altered in order to convey a number of different, and often conflicting arguments. And the latest batch of statistics released by the HPA, regarding injuries in polo are no exception. (warning lots of maths below)

Firstly, I would like to begin by congratulating the HPA on attempting to achieve this data at all. No matter how inaccurate or misleading it may turn out to be, it will always be better than nothing. It may also prove very useful in the future, allowing the HPA to reliably track and monitor the safety of players, and compare the effectiveness of any future rule changes, designed to improve player safety. For example, although they may have missed the bus on the new helmet regulations, you would have hoped to have seen an obvious reduction in brain and head injuries after these were put in place. Hopefully this can go some way to allowing the HPA to continue their quest to prioritise safety, in what is, after all, a very dangerous sport.

However the data is far from concrete, a fact that, to their credit, the HPA has noted. Although their response rate was very high, at 20% giving them a total of 439 submissions, this is likely to be a biased sample, meaning conclusions will be hard to draw from it. Due to the form being voluntary, it is more than likely that people who had not suffered any injuries are going the skip the form, while those who had suffered an injury will be more likely to take the time to respond. This means that the data will show a greater number of injuries than the actual total when extrapolated out over the entire polo community.

Further more, the actual responses seemed a little vague as well. The third most common injury sustained in 2018 was classed as a ‘minor injury’ while other things some people would often associate with being minor (bruising/concussion) found their way into second place. It also begs the question that if an injury was more minor the a bruise, are most people even going to class it as an injury? By polling the players themselves and not the medical staff on site at each event, the lines between each of the categories can become blurred and the statistics less reliable. The HPA claim this is an unavoidable evil due to the fact that most clubs rely on volunteer medics (unlike sports such as racing) and as a result cannot be expected to collect data for the HPA. However it is hard to see how the HPA can ever expect “reliable" data when people will have such differing ideas of what kind of injury they have sustained.

Another interesting point raised is the surprisingly low injury rate per chukka, at 0.12%. The HPA goes on to compare this to Irish point to point who have an injury rate of 0.89% and Irish national Hunt at 1.07%. This seems to imply that polo is pretty safe. The obvious issue here however is that it is judged per chukka. Surely a compete race is the equivalent to an entire game, and therefore we need to, at the very least multiply this figure by 4, giving us 0.48% per game. Admittedly this is still barely half of the Irish point to point figures, but this is still extremely high. A study carried outing the US found that the NFL has an injury rate of 0.0754% per game, 6 times less than polo. And this was a worryingly high figure for them. Other sports such as baseball and basketball have even lower injury rates, sometimes lower than 24 times less risky than polo. So do not be fooled by the figures. Although there is always something more dangerous, polo still ranks highly among the top dangerous sports, and safety cannot be taken for granted. That is why these figures, no matter their final accuracy are so important.