Imagine dedicating your whole life to a career in sport only to have your ability to play taken away in a split second collision with another player.
This is a danger faced in all contact sports. While most injuries are mitigated with safety equipment the exception seems to surround eyes and vision.
With the possible exception of squash eyewear is virtually absent in many sports despite eye injury being a distinct possibility. Rafik Tahraoui’s dreams of sporting stardom may have ended on October 3 last year following an incident which left him virtually blind in one eye.
Tahraoui plays handball at international level. ‘There’s a lot of grappling in handball. You have to make physical contact with them to stop them, it’s a bit like rugby in that way,’ says Tahraoui who explains how his injury came about. ‘I received a pass in front of goal then turned around to shoot and some guy came from behind and his arm came right around and caught me in the face.’
The opponent’s hand ended up making contact with Tahraoui’s eye. ‘When it happened, it sounds silly, but I actually felt his finger right inside my head, his finger went right inside my eye. I immediately lost the vision in my eye.’ He also lost the feeling in one side of his face. ‘You know the feeling when you have got a dead arm, when it goes all numb. The whole left side of my face went like that. I ran straight over to my coach and said: “Is my eye still in my head?” It was that scary I thought he had pulled my eyeball right out.’
A visit to hospital showed that Tahraoui had suffered a range of injuries. These include damage and bruising to the retina, a CT scan showed damage to the optic nerve. ‘For the first two weeks after the accident I was at the hospital every single day getting different tests done,’ he adds.
While his support team was keen to get him back ready for his sport the hospital had bad news. ‘They said it was my optic nerve and there wasn’t really much they could do for it.’ He was warned that he may never get his vision back. The consultant told Tahraoui he had seen similar cases where it had been a year before any improvement began. It might get better or it might not. In the first two months he went from not being able to see anything to being able to see just light as a blur. ‘I can’t distinguish anything in my left eye and they have warned me that it could be like that for the rest of my life.’
[CaptionComponent="2504"]There was worse news to come. ‘With the impact I also sustained multiple fractures around my eye socket,’ he says. One of the fractures is so large that he has been warned not to do any exercise. ‘They are worried about the tissue falling into that gap. So at the moment I require surgery to fix my eye socket with a plate but that is impossible for now. To do the surgery they will have to move my eye, and at the moment they say that is too risky as any damage could cause me to lose my sight completely and it may never come back. It’s a bit of a rubbish situation to be in.’
Given the potential for injury in sports such as handball and the devastating effect it can have it is surprising that precious little advice is given to athletes about protective eyewear. Tahraoui says throughout his sporting career he has never been advised about the need for eye protection: ‘Nothing, we don’t get anything whatsoever. I’ve had some fairly bad injuries in my time playing sport but I never considered that I would get an injury to my eye, it didn’t even cross my mind. I have been poked in the eye but nothing more. You accept the fact that you might break an ankle or something like that but an eye injury never comes into your head.’
The only example Tahraoui has is of a Polish handball player, one of the top players in the world, who wears eye protection because he has already lost an eye. This was due to another hazard handball players face, the resin used to make the ball sticky. ‘The Polish player sustained an injury when the resin went into his eye and ripped part of his eye out,’ says Tahraoui. ‘I’ve had that resin in my eye before.’
Tahraoui was made aware of protective eyewear when Bushnell Performance Optics got in touch following his accident. Dawne Warren, business and communications manager, provided a Bollé Baller frame for Tahraoui to assess.
[CaptionComponent="2505"]This product features polycarbonate lenses with a minimum thickness of 2mm. It’s impact resistant and meets all of the standards covering strength, flexibility and materials – and with good reason: ‘I throw a ball at 110kph,’ says Tahraoui. ‘If that hits you in the face with normal glasses on it’s going to make a mess of the glasses and a mess of your face and people do take shots to the face. As long as the glasses can sustain the impact then they are allowed.’
Since suffering his eye injury Tahraoui has spoken to others in the sport about his experience. ‘My coach is quite traumatised by the whole thing. He has always known me as a very stubborn player, if I get injured I’ll still play through an injury – there’s no way I’m coming off. When this happened I came off the court asking if my eye was still in my head and panicking.’
The incident has also had an effect on other players. ‘A couple of weeks ago one of my players took a bit of a hit to the face and as soon as it happened he screamed and panicked. I asked him about it afterwards and he said as soon as he felt the pain of the impact he had thought of my injury and it scared him.’ Tahraoui also has a cousin who is moving to play basketball in the US and is talking about getting some eyewear to play in.
However, attitudes change slowly. None of Tahraoui’s teammates have yet taken up protective eyewear. ‘They know about the injury but they don’t really know about the eyewear just yet. I’ve told the coaches and a few friends but that’s only two or three so the rest of them don’t know about it. He is now working with Bollé and the Handball Association to alert other players to the dangers and highlight the protective products available. ‘For a couple of hundred pounds it’s worth it if an injury is going to screw up your eyesight,’ he says.
For now, Tahraoui is in the situation of not being able to play or train and not knowing what the future holds. ‘This eye injury has potentially ruined my career at the highest level because I can’t see out of my left eye. If I can’t see the opposition player I’m useless on the court,’ he adds.
[CaptionComponent="2506"]Tahraoui says that while there is an element of machismo, with players not wanting to wear protective eyewear, the main factor is that players just don’t consider the potentials risks.
‘They think they can get away with it. The players at the higher level, who have much more to lose, should be leading the way. If the players at the higher level do it then the players at the lower level will follow suit. They may never get hit but it’s like car insurance: it’s better to have it than not have it. ‘
‘Some players might say it’s a physical sport and you don’t need to wear stuff like that but I think the major reason is that people just don’t think about it.’ He says he has played sport at an elite level since school and: ‘not once have I thought about getting an eye injury or has eyewear come into my head. I think it is similar for most of the other players.’
As for the future Tahraoui is hoping for a good recovery but is keen to pass on his experience to other players. ‘I would definitely recommend them to get some eye protection,’ he says as he struggles to describe the impact the eye injury has had. ‘It hasn’t just affected my sport it’s affected my life away from sport. I run a business and supply a lot of teams through my business and I have had to cancel meetings and lose business because of the state of my face, it doesn’t look very professional.
‘Some people might say that if you saw all of the players on a handball court wearing glasses they would look like clowns. I know that’s what a lot of people would say but I would rather look like a clown wearing glasses than have an eye injury.’