{"id":771637,"date":"2026-07-01T07:46:11","date_gmt":"2026-07-01T07:46:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/771637\/"},"modified":"2026-07-01T07:46:11","modified_gmt":"2026-07-01T07:46:11","slug":"from-the-pocket-footy-faces-an-existential-threat-in-cte-the-afls-words-are-wholly-inadequate-afl","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/771637\/","title":{"rendered":"From the Pocket: Footy faces an existential threat in CTE. The AFL\u2019s words are wholly inadequate | AFL"},"content":{"rendered":"

Monday\u2019s ABC Four Corners episode looked at the life and death of Nick Lowden<\/a>, who at 23 was the youngest footballer to be diagnosed with chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). CTE affects participants in collision and combat sports \u2013 having been first identified in boxers nearly a century ago \u2013 as well as soldiers and domestic violence victims. \u201cWhy am I like this?\u201d Lowden asked his mother. \u201cWhat\u2019s wrong with me? What\u2019s wrong with my brain?\u201d<\/p>\n

The worst of these stories end up in the flat, neutral tone of coroner\u2019s reports. In 408 subheadings, John Cain\u2019s inquest into the death of Shane Tuck<\/a> documented what CTE does to the brain, the lives of athletes and their loved ones. The Tuck and Lowden families spoke of young men who didn\u2019t understand what was happening to them, who drew on their athlete\u2019s instinct to fight, and who eventually retreated. Nothing I have read about a footballer has been so crushing as Cain\u2019s detached description of the final 24 hours of Tuck\u2019s life.<\/p>\n

These stories are almost always about professional or semi-professional players. What\u2019s harder to gauge, and harder to mitigate, is the impact at the grassroots level. Lowden was no park footballer. It was in the best junior feeder competition in Australia, the under-18 TAC Cup, that he first suffered a serious concussion. He won a premiership in the strong SANFL competition, but there are dozens of tiers below that. As the standard drops, so too does the quality of grounds and umpiring, and the ability to access medical help. Many country clubs are operating on an increasingly thin line. Ask anyone running a club in the suburbs or the bush and they\u2019ll tell you there\u2019s a growing disconnect with the AFL<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The Giants and the Tigers pay tribute to Shane Tuck, who was found to have CTE after his death in 2020. Photograph: Dean Lewins\/AAP<\/p>\n

It\u2019s something Peter Hanlon covered in a feature series for the Age on the 40th anniversary of a notorious country grand final between Colac-Coragulac and South Warrnambool. Hanlon described the game as \u201coutrageously violent\u201d and interviewed men who\u2019ve battled a raft of mental health challenges in the ensuing decades, as well as their increasingly concerned families. \u201cFor every Danny Frawley and Polly Farmer,\u201d he writes, \u201cthere are thousands who endured multiple concussions in the suburbs and the bush who are pondering a frightening thought \u2013 what if that\u2019s me?\u201d<\/p>\n

The questions posed by Four Corners are the same questions that grieving parents, coroners, litigants and broken men in their 40s and 50s are asking: what is the governing body\u2019s level of responsibility and culpability? Is the AFL responsible for the entire junior, suburban and country footballing ecosystem? Is it responsible for incidents from 40 years ago? Is it responsible for educating every parent about head trauma?<\/p>\n

What\u2019s beyond dispute is that the AFL has been too slow to act on the dangers of CTE. For nearly a decade, their concussion guidelines were shaped by Dr Paul McCrory, who in 2016 dismissed \u201cthe carry on and hoo-ha\u201d around CTE. Before being exposed as a plagiarist<\/a>, he led a multimillion-dollar AFL study into concussion that was criticised for \u201ca lack of governance, stewardship and coordination\u201d<\/a>. On Four Corners, the AFL\u2019s general manager of health and football operations, Laura Kane, said the league still didn\u2019t have a CTE policy, but claimed it was committed to research in the area. Many of Cain\u2019s coronial recommendations were \u201con track\u201d, she said, adding that \u201crepeated head trauma is extremely undesirable\u201d.<\/p>\n

They were the well-thumbed words of a league all too aware that lawyers are circling, and words that should have been spoken by CEO Andrew Dillon. The words were inadequate not only on a human level, but in addressing the wider existential threat the sport must confront. While concussions can have serious and ongoing consequences, it\u2019s the accumulation of microscopic damage to the brain from bumps and tackles that leads to CTE. Lowden, who started playing at six years old, could have had CTE even if he had never experienced a concussion.<\/p>\n

AFL executives Laura Kane and Andrew Dillon at the MCG in 2025. Photograph: Quinn Rooney\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

The neuropathologist Michael Buckland calls CTE a \u201cdisease of exposure\u201d. The way we\u2019re going to prevent it, he told Four Corners, \u201cis by reducing exposure, just like skin cancer and the summer sun\u201d. That means significantly reducing contact training hours. It means increasing the age at which young players are allowed to tackle, which is sure to meet considerable resistance. Boston University\u2019s Ann McKee, a world-leading expert in CTE, wants to ban tackling until adulthood. A lot of neurologists disagree on this. But most concur that the key is to start contact sport at a later age, and that having fewer and shorter matches at the senior level is essential. The latter two in particular are at odds with the AFL\u2019s commercial imperatives.<\/p>\n

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So much of the AFL\u2019s focus has been on head injuries at the elite level of the game. But nearly three-quarters of a million people play some sort of version of Australian rules football \u2013 from Auskick to the thousands of junior and senior clubs across the country. Kane said: \u201cOur job is not to communicate every single aspect of risk that exists in our game.\u201d And she\u2019s right. But a 23-year-old with CTE violently shifts the parameters and the risk profile. We\u2019re no longer talking about 60-year-old former champions at risk of developing dementia. We\u2019re no longer talking about tinkering with the rules at the professional level. We\u2019re talking about whether this sport is inherently unsafe<\/a> for all who play it. It\u2019s a question a lot of parents are asking right now. It\u2019s a question many former players are asking. It\u2019s a question the AFL failed to answer properly on Four Corners. And it\u2019s a question they soon may have to answer in a courtroom.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Monday\u2019s ABC Four Corners episode looked at the life and death of Nick Lowden, who at 23 was…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":771638,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[560],"tags":[638,64,63,55,639,85],"class_list":["post-771637","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-afl","tag-afl","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-australian-football-league","tag-australianfootballleague","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/771637","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=771637"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/771637\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/771638"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=771637"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=771637"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=771637"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}