I imagine someone new to sports would struggle with the way games handle injuries; even I'm sometimes unsettled when play resumes just seconds after a broken athlete is peeled off the turf. Basketball games often continue around an inured player lying in a heap on the court; sometimes a healthy player trips over the body. If we don't stop for a devastating injury, what will ever slow us down?
It's odd how this perspective only comes to me when I think about sports. A commuting cyclist is killed by an eighteen-wheeler, and out come the orange cones to divert traffic around the mops and buckets; a ghost bike will eventually oversee an otherwise unchanged scene, where the show goes on. A sporting event and its customs can only do so much, I think, to counter the indifference of the society it entertains.
