In case you hadn’t heard, Kevin Ogar is a dude who was competing in a regional Crossfit meet over the weekend and ended up paralyzed after a missed lift.
The whole story is a little hard to track down, but it seems like the event involved a heavy snatch, he ended up having to bail on a rep so he dropped to the floor and ditched the bar behind him, the bar took a bad bounce (allegedly off a stack of plates that were placed too close to the lifting platform) and hit his back, separating his T11 and T12 vertebrae leaving him with no feeling or movement below the waist.
There’s supposedly a video of the accident somewhere but I haven’t found it. Bits and pieces of the story can be found on a few different sites (which can’t be linked to here). In any case, this is just bad news for a fellow lifter. He’s just 28 and it looks like he was a lifelong athlete, just getting into Crossfit a few years ago. Also, most people are saying he’s uninsured, so there are all sorts of fundraisers being planned to help him out.
For all the hate Crossfit usually gets, I’ve seen some truly heinous stuff written about this incident. “Deserved it for doing Crossfit”, “what do you expect”, “who cares, no surprise”, etc. Typical Internet crap. From my perspective, it wasn’t a “Crossfit injury.” It was a missed snatch that led to an unexpected tragedy. It’s not like he spun off a bar during a kipping muscle-up and landed on his neck.
Just kinda ranting here. I didn’t see any mention of it yet and felt the BSL forum was more appropriate than Off-Topic or Injuries/Rehab, since we’re all lifters here and we’ve actually been doing a great job of building a great sense of community. I just figured it could extend to another big, strong dude even though he didn’t happen to post here.
