Last ride for Evel Knievel, man of steel and scars

EVEL Knievel, the hard-living, death-defying adventurer who went from stealing motorcycles to riding them in a series of spectacular airborne stunts in the 1960s and '70s, has died. He was 69.

Knievel had been in failing health for years with diabetes and idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, an incurable lung condition. In 1999 he underwent a liver transplant after nearly dying of hepatitis C, which he believed he had contracted through a blood transfusion after one of many violent spills.

Only days before his death, he and rap artist Kanye West settled a lawsuit over West's use of Knievel's trademarked image in a music video.

Knievel amazed and horrified onlookers in 1968 by vaulting his motorcycle 45 metres over the fountains of Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, only to land in a bone-breaking crash.

He continued to win fame and fortune by getting huge audiences to watch him roar his motorcycle up a ramp, fly over 10, 15 or 20 cars parked side by side and come down on another ramp. Perhaps his most spectacular stunt, another disaster, was an attempt to jump an Idaho canyon on a rocket-powered motorcycle in 1974.

Knievel's showmanship, skill and disdain for death were so admired that he became a folk hero.

Performing stunts hundreds of times, Knievel repeatedly shattered bones as well as his bikes. When he was forced to retire in 1980, he told reporters that he was "nothing but scar tissue and surgical steel".

He underwent as many as 15 major operations to relieve severe trauma and repair broken bones — skull, pelvis, ribs, collarbone, shoulders and hips. "I created the character called Evel Knievel, and he sort of got away from me," he said.

His health was also compromised by years of heavy drinking; he said at one point he was consuming half a bottle of whiskey a day, washed down with beer chasers.

Robert Craig Knievel was born in the copper-mining town of Butte, Montana, and raised by grandparents.

As he told the story, he acquired the name Evel as a boy. Arrested for stealing hubcaps, he was taken to jail, where the police were holding a man named Knofel, whom they called "Awful Knofel".

They decided to call Robert "Evil Knievel". The name stuck, and some years later, Knievel legally took the name Evel, changing the "i" to "e" because he thought it looked better.

A star athlete at school, he volunteered to be an army paratrooper in the 1950s and made 30 jumps. Afterwards he played hockey with the Charlotte Clippers. Then he took up motorcycle racing until falling and breaking bones in a 1962 race.

Full article: http://www.theage.com.au/news/world/last-ride-for-man-of-steel-and-scars/2007/12/01/1196394688218.html

Scheer broke leg playing volleyball

Her soccer-playing days are over, but that doesn't mean Elena Scheer can't participate in other sports.

Scheer, a junior at Pescadero High School, tried out for the volleyball team this year. Playing in just her third year of volleyball, she worked her way toward being in the first rotation.

She was out there, playing hard and having fun. Then it happened again.

Going up for the ball, she twisted her body, preventing her from hitting the net. She landed awkwardly on her foot.

"At first, I thought everyone was mad at me because I gave the other team a point," Scheer said. "But then, I saw how swollen up my foot had gotten. I thought, not again."

She broke a bone in her leg, and had to miss the rest of the volleyball season.

"It was obvious that she had a broken bone," said volleyball coach Wayne Johnson. "Her leg swelled up almost instantly."

She now once again has to wait for the doctors to clear her to play non-contact sports. A freak soccer accident has barred her from playing any contact sports.

During the summer, when she wasn't catching up on schoolwork, she was either running or swimming. She couldn't wait to get cleared for volleyball.

"I love being on the court or on the field," Scheer said. "I was so excited to be on the court."

She doesn't feel cursed despite the injuries.

"Stuff happens," Scheer said.

Source: http://www.hmbreview.com/articles/2007/11/30/community/sports/story02.txt

Any old broken bone could mean osteoporosis

No matter the circumstances, if you're 65 or older and break a bone, your risk of having osteoporosis and suffering more fractures is greater than that of someone who has yet to break a bone after his 65th birthday, scientists report today.

Their finding contradicts the widely held belief that only bones broken in a fall from a standing height or lower are related to the bone-thinning disease osteoporosis. Bones broken in falls from greater heights or in car crashes, so-called high-trauma fractures, don't count as red flags for osteoporosis, although there is little scientific evidence to support that view.

One of the main problems is that the concept of high trauma is fuzzy, says lead author Dawn Mackey. The magnitude, velocity and direction of the force applied to bone can vary from car crash to car crash and fall to fall, so the impact on bone of low-speed collisions isn't necessarily greater than the impact on bone of slipping on ice and hitting the pavement, Mackey's team writes. Yet the former is generally considered high trauma, while the latter is not.

The researchers analyzed data from two studies. One followed 8,022 women for about nine years; the other followed 5,995 men for about five years. All were at least 65 at the start.

Overall, 264 women's and 94 men's first broken bones were considered to be high-trauma fractures, while 3,211 women's and 346 men's first broken bones were low-trauma ones.

Whether their first fractures were high or low trauma, women who'd broken a bone were about a third more likely to sustain another fracture during the course of the study than women who did not have an initial fracture. In addition, the scientists write in the Journal of the American Medical Association, women who sustained either high-trauma or low-trauma fractures were equally likely to have low bone-mineral density, considered the gold standard for diagnosing osteoporosis.

Although there were too few fractures among the men to quantify the risk of another fracture, the authors observed similar trends.

But the presumption, Mackey says, has been that anyone, weak bones or not, could suffer a fracture in a car crash or a fall from a ladder. When you break a bone in that kind of an accident, you've earned it, or so many doctors believe, says Mackey, an epidemiologist at the California Pacific Medical Center Research Institute in San Francisco.

As a result, she says, older people who have a high-trauma fracture don't receive the same sort of workup for osteoporosis that, say, peers who slip on the ice and break a hip do. Doctors don't think osteoporosis drugs can prevent high-trauma fractures. And clinical trials of drugs designed to treat osteoporosis may be overlooking valuable information by ignoring such fractures.

"Fractures previously defined as due to high trauma, such as those from a blunt injury in a motor vehicle crash or a fall from a chair, can no longer be dismissed as being unrelated to osteoporosis," Mayo Clinic osteoporosis researcher Sundeep Khosla writes in an accompanying editorial.

Source: http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2007-11-27-osteoporosis_N.htm?csp=34

Study: Lack Of Sunlight, Milk, Exercise Causing Bone Deficiency In Children

Rickets is making a comeback, but bone specialists are more concerned that the recent rise in diagnosis of the disease (virtually wiped out until the 1990s) is a red flag indicating another, more serious issue — that possibly millions of seemingly healthy children aren’t building as much strong bone as they should, which may leave them more vulnerable to osteoporosis in the future than their grandparents are now.

Experts say that an overall lack of milk, sunshine and exercise is becoming an anti-bone trifecta. As a result, scientists are taking the first steps to ascertain how much of a problem is caused by kids not getting enough of the bone-building trio, based on new research that shows what “normal” bone density is for children of different ages.

Dr. Heidi Kalkwarf of the Cincinnati Children's Hospital led a national study that gave bone scans to 1,500 healthy children ages 6 to 17 to see how bone mass is accumulated. This resulted in the first bone-growth guide for children — similar to height-and-weight charts — being published last summer, designed specifically for pediatricians treating children at high risk of bone problems.

The government-funded study will continue to track those 1,500 children for seven more years to see how their bones turn out. Ultimately, the study seeks to find exactly what bone-growth level is cause for concern.

“I don't know if we're raising a population that's going to be at risk for osteoporosis,” Kalkwarf says. “It's really hard to know what the cutoff is; how low is too low?”

Since almost half of peak bone mass develops during adolescence, the concern is that missing out on the strongest possible bones in childhood could haunt people decades later. By the 30s, bone is broken down faster than it's rebuilt. Then it's a race to maintain bone and avoid the thin bones of osteoporosis in old age.

“There's some early data showing that even a 10-percent deficit in your bone mass when you finish your adolescent years can increase your potential risk of having osteoporosis and fractures by as much as 50 percent,” says James Beaty, Ph.D., president of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons.

Already there's evidence that children in the United States break their arms more often today than four decades ago — girls suffer breaks 56 percent more often, while boys suffer breaks 32 percent more often, according to a Mayo Clinic study. Some say this is due to newer forms of risky play — like inline skates — but Kalkwarf's hospital recently found that kids who break an arm have lower bone density than their playmates who don't.

Doctors have long known that less than a quarter of adolescents get enough calcium, but strong bones require more than calcium alone. Exercise is at least as important. (Consider this: The dominant arm of a tennis player has 35-percent more bone than the non-dominant arm.)

Likewise, the body can't absorb calcium and harden bones without vitamin D, which is absorbed by the body following exposure to sunlight. But by some estimates, 30 percent of teens get too little of the “sunshine vitamin”. This is suspected to be the result of increased teen computer use, a lack of safe places to play outdoors and less school physical education keeping kids and adolescents inside and away from the sun. In addition, because skin pigment alters a person’s rate of sun absorption, black children are particularly at risk.

Rickets marks the worst deficiency, where bones become so soft that legs literally bow. Rickets was once thought to have been eradicated with milk fortification, but the comeback of the disease suggests that there is more to solving the problem.

“I am now treating rickets in a way that I never treated it 20 years ago,” says Laura Tosi, Ph.D., bone health chief at Children's National Medical Center in Washington.

She diagnoses rickets or super-low D levels in children every month at a bone clinic she runs for mostly inner-city children. Fortunately, rickets caught early is easily cured with high-dose infusions of vitamin D and calcium. However, Tosi says it’s the kids whose vitamin D levels haven’t gotten quite low enough to produce symptoms of deficiency that she worries about, because they may never get treated.

Source: http://www.lookingfit.com/hotnews/7bh279755.html

World Supersport: Tommy Hill suffers broken leg and hip in testing crash

Tommy Hill is in hospital in Spain after crashing his Hannspree Altea Honda at his first test in Calafat.

Hill was flicked off the CBR600RR after a problem with the electronic quick shifter caused the engine to cut out whilst he was mid corner.

The heavy crash left the 22-year-old Brit with a fractured right hip, fractured left tibia and broken bones in his hand.

Tommy Hill will have his hip operated on at Tarragona hospital tomorrow, before finding out when he will be able to make the trip back to the UK.

Hill signed for the Italian Altea team just two weeks ago and was due to complete his first test in Calafat before heading to Jerez in December. The crash is a devastating blow to his 2008 hopes and he now faces a tough battle to get back to full fitness in time for the start off the season in Qatar at the end of February.

Speaking exclusively to MCN from his hospital bed, Hill said: “I wasn’t even planning on riding on Sunday but the team asked me about doing a few laps just to make sure that the bike was alright.

“I’d never been to the circuit before so I went out for a little ride around. In the first two laps I had a problem with the quick shifter so I came in and we made an adjustment but the problem was still there and it was still cutting out mid corner.

“I came in again and they changed the shifter, but the problem was still there so we turned it off and I went back to a manual shift, which was fine.

“A bit later they tried something with the electronics and put the quick shifter back on but as I came through the double apex right up the hill you’re leaning off the side of the bike and the power cut and launched me off.

“It wasn’t such a problem but after I landed I felt my leg twist around and around, like Leon Camier’s crash at Cadwell, but it was more my hip.

“The hospital here looks very good and I’m having an operation on my hip tomorrow (Tuesday). The problem I’ve got is that I need to try and be walking on my hip as soon as possible but I can’t because my left leg is fractured.

“My right leg is swelling up a lot now and it’s gone rock hard and I’ve been in a lot of pain. Now I just want to get this operation done and then get back to the UK.”

Source: http://www.motorcyclenews.com/MCN/sport/sportresults/mcn/2007/november/nov26-30/nov2607worldsupersporttommyhillsuffersbrokenlegandhip/