Dangerous Sports in Pandemic Times. Analisys for Children’s Public Sport Units of Romania

Abstract

In our study, we categorised sports for which there are public sports clubs for children organized in Romania – School Sports Clubs and Classrooms with Sports Programme. These are financed from the state budget and local public administration. Training grounds, auxiliary spaces, materials, and facilities widely differ. With this in mind, we have only considered the dressing room as an interaction space between athletes. We consider that training and competition interactions are different, but in most sports, there is a risk to facilitate virus transmission – including SARS-CoV-2. The list of the 41 sports practised in children’s public sports clubs was compiled. Private clubs were not included in the analysis, even though they had the same risk regarding virus transmission. For each sport, we considered the following dyadic interactions: athlete-athlete and athlete-coach, in both training and competitions, according to the rules of each sport. We also added the interactions between athletes in the dressing rooms and between athletes and match/competition officials (judge, referee etc.). Each interaction was subjectively graded with a number from 1 to 5: 1 = low interaction, at least 5 m distance; 5 = very close interaction, less than 1 m distance. The analysis showed that considering the current COVID-19 pandemic, organized sport is most of the time a dangerous environment for athletes, coaches, and officials, the most dangerous being the team sports. We believe that the current study might be of use in deciding which sports would be safer to “reopen” in the future.