Top 50 sporting injuries

For a world-renowned risk taker, real life is perilous too. Ask Valentino Rossi, serial world champion and perhaps the finest and most courageous rider ever to sit on a motorbike. He has just injured himself drawing the curtains .

It’s all very funny . . . for everyone except Rossi, who has had stitches in two injuries and may be unable to take part in pre-season testing in Malaysia tomorrow. No doubt he’d be safer with one cheek on and one cheek off and his knee scraping the Tarmac as his bike corners at Mach 3, than he was doing the household chores.

The problem was that he tripped and fell – how could a man with such extraordinary muscle control and such exceptional balance be so absurdly clumsy? – and crash-landed on a glass table.

He has one cut on his left hand and another on his foot, and I can’t work out how he managed the double either. It will certainly have been shocking and painful and bloody and highly unamusing: but, all the same, the thought of a daredevil brought low by a pair of curtains is a rather wonderful thing.

The incongruity is irresistible. For any top athlete, one of the essential skills is body-management. Knowing when to train hard and when to pull out, knowing what treatment works and what makes things worse, knowing how to avoid long-term damage: all this is a vital part of an athlete’s life. Many athletes in all sports, and every single performer in track and field, will happily spend an evening telling how they manage a dodgy Achilles.

But the snag is that even athletes must also spend at least some of their time doing that real-life stuff. And real life is, as Rossi will tell you, fraught with perils. Real life can be absurd, undignified and painful.

Sometimes strange injuries come from stupidity, or even vanity. Chris Lewis, an England cricketer who was forever on the verge of being a fine player, tried to fill himself with a new sense of purpose by shaving his head. He was in the Caribbean at the time, and missed the next Test with sunstroke.

Rio Ferdinand, a footballer, is alarmingly accident-prone for the world’s most expensive defender. These days he plays for Manchester United and England, but was still with Leeds United, and at £18 million their prize asset, when he injured himself watching television.

He sat for several hours goggling with his foot resting on the coffee table. The result was that he strained the tendons behind his knee and missed two games.

Sometimes, an injury comes not from folly or inattentiveness, but from malign fate. Derek Pringle, former England all-rounder, injured himself while writing a letter and had to withdraw from a Test match.

He was sending match tickets to a friend and somehow stretched and wrenched his back; he was – and for that matter still is – one of those big, uncoordinated fellows who takes up slightly more than their fair share of the room, even when they’re on their own.

Probably the collector’s item, though, is David Beasant, a goalkeeper. There’s always a joke to be made when a goalie drops something, and what Beasant dropped was a bottle of salad cream, a substance rich in comic possibilities. The stuff landed on his foot and ruptured ankle ligaments, so he’s one person who hasn’t seen the funny side.

Top athletes are brave and strong and balanced and coordinated, or they wouldn’t be able to do those things that excite the world’s admiration: but even they are not immune to the salad-cream bottles and coffee tables of outrageous fortune.

There is a tendency to see sporting heroes as people somehow set apart from the rest of us: immune from the small things that trouble us, let off all the small follies and indignities that the rest of us suffer as we rub about the world.

But heroes must breathe the same air as us: heroes live in the same world as us and even they sometimes discover that it hands out misfortunes to people without distinction and does so with capricious glee.

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