… seems to be the modern form of “dwarf tossing”, where the diminutive young ladies who are tossed 20 or 30 feet in the air (i.e., flyers) have rates of concussions and injuries that rival football players – all without the medical infrastructure of a well-funded D1 program.
{{ From 1980 to 2001, emergency-room visits for cheerleaders soared nearly 500 percent. Over that same period, competitive cheerleading was responsible for more catastrophic injuries to female athletes than all other high school and college sports combined, according to the National Center for Catastrophic Sport Injury Research. And those statistics included “bases,” the girls at the bottom of the pyramid, who were at lower risk for head injuries. Restrict the data just to flyers, the girls being tossed in the air, and injury rates became “semi-suicidal,” according to Dr. Robert Cantu, medical director of the research center.
“The flyer was the riskiest person in all of women’s sport,” he said recently. By some metrics, the risk of catastrophic head and spine injuries was higher in cheerleading than in football. }}
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