Resumen de A Little Pain Never Hurt Anybody: A Photo-Essay on the Normalization of Sport Injuries

Timothy Jon Curry, Richard H. Strauss

• This visual study explores the social conditions that promote the normalization of injuries in sport. Photographs taken at a university wrestling team’s meets and practices, and in a hospital operating room, convey some of the details and social ambience of today’s approach to collegiate sports medicine. Quotations drawn from photo-elicitation interviews with the coaches and athletes express the views of the participants. This study suggests that the normalization of injuries in sport—illustrated when universities make medical care immediately available and coaches and athletes minimize the significance of injury—encourages continued participation. Such continuation may be questioned by those concerned with the long-term effects of “playing with pain.”