Personally speaking, I have always been risk-averse when it comes to taking part in sport. I've hurt my calf through running, and bear a number of scars collected in Sunday football. In broad terms, however, I have not feared hurt when setting forth down country lanes in my trainers, or when crossing the white line for Bishop's Stortford Swifts or whoever else it might have been.

The sports I have never fancied have a common factor – a hard ball. Cricket. Hockey. Both, in my view, worrying pastimes. Being struck just once by a cricket ball, and, during a school match, by a hockey ball, was enough to confirm this view.

How scary must it be, then, to find oneself in goal during a hockey match – standing bang in the middle of the target? It is a question I was able to put recently to someone who knows – Beth Storry, goalkeeper for the British women's hockey team.

Speaking at the Bisham Abbey training ground where final preparations for the London Olympics are being made, Storry recalled a painful hockey incident from her own schooldays. "I still remember being hit as a child while playing hockey, and someone saying to me:  'It's only pain. You'll get over it.'

"At the time I thought 'Thanks a lot!' But it's true. You have a bruise for a couple of weeks, but you get over it."

And right there is where my attitude, and that of an international sporting performer, diverge...


Storry (pictured above, right), as it happens, still has a bruise – quite a large one on the side of her knee. Which, as she soon makes clear, is pretty much the only bit of her that goes unprotected when she puts herself at the epicentre of thrashing sticks and that ominous cannonball.

When Storry steps out to defend the British goal she is clad in boots, leg pads, padded shorts, body armour, arm protection and an encompassing helmet with faceguard. She's like something out of Star Wars, in fact. And she needs to be.

"You will occasionally have a situation when your opponent is a couple of metres away from you and it's a bouncing ball and you can see them going to volley it and smash it," she says. "You do have a moment of 'just please hit padding'...

"But my gear is fantastic. You can feel the impact of a ball, you know a ball has just hit you, but it doesn't hurt.

"I used to play in steel toe caps and shin pads. But it's all relative to the level you play at. As you get better, the level of protection improves. So it's not something I worry about.

"To be honest I wouldn't play outfield because they don't have much protection – and even though I'm having the ball hit at me I've got it all!"

If one were speaking for the motion: "This House believes that hockey is not the nastiest, most dangerous game you can play", then one could perhaps use Storry's testimony as evidence.


And you could back it up with the views of Louise Jukes (pictured above), a former England under 18 hockey player who now plays a sport she reckons is even rougher – handball. "Even if they've got sticks in hockey, the fists are worse," says Jukes, a pleasant and strongly built young woman with whom, in any sporting context, you would not mess.

"Handball is a full-on contact sport, much more aggressive than hockey," says this 28-year-old, who joined the handball programme in 2008 through the Sporting Giants talent-spotting initiative fronted by Sir Steve Redgrave.

"After hockey, I did initially find it difficult to get that physical edge in handball, that aggression you need. It took a little while to get used to the pushing and the shoving and everything else that goes with it. When we started we did quite a bit of judo as practice for the physical contact.

"My job is to stay in the middle between the two D's, so I am constantly getting pushed, and I have to be sturdy and strong to make sure the ball can be passed into me. They start tackling me before I get the ball. And equally I try and push them to make space for myself."

Earlier I have spoken to Jukes' 21-year-old teammate Holly Lam-Moores (pictured below), a smaller and slighter athlete who, as a winger, puts much more emphasis on sprinting from corner to corner in defence and attack. But when I ask her about the aggressive side of the game, and whether she has found herself targeted, her response is feisty.


"If I get hit I'm not going to cry about it," she says. "You just get straight back up. There's no time to cry about it. And if somebody hits you really hard it actually makes you more motivated to go back and hit them back – not as in punch. But putting in that big tackle.

"It's body to body. Nothing from the side. Nothing from behind. It's all about grabbing a body on square.

"If you were about to shoot look this, I would go like THAT" she says, one hand gripping my upper arm and another bashing down on my "throwing arm", "and stop you.

"Imagine you are coming full power into me," she adds, having kindly released me from her iron grip. "I am just going to stand there and try to stop you. It's not like basketball. It's like controlled rugby."

It's all right. I'm convinced. And I have now added another sport to my list of worrying pastimes to be avoided.

Mike Rowbottom, one of Britain's most talented sportswriters, has covered the past five Summer and four Winter Olympics for The Independent. Previously he has worked for the Daily Mail, The Times, The Observer, the Sunday Correspondent and The Guardian. He is now chief feature writer for insidethegames. Rowbottom's Twitter feed can be accessed here.