Sports Law • Risk Management

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KC Chiefs Linebacker Suicide Possibly Linked to Head Trauma

On the morning of December 1, 2012 Javon Belcher, a 25-year-old linebacker for the Kansas City Chiefs, fatally shot his girlfriend and mother of his three-month-old daughter at their private residence before taking his own life at the Chiefs’ team facility. Belcher was confronted by Chiefs’ general manager, Scott Pioli and head coach, Romeo Crennel, in the parking lot outside the team’s facilities and thanked them for all they had done for him and asked that they take care of his baby daughter, before Belcher turned the gun on himself.

The 2012 NYC Marathon Canceled Due to Hurricane Sandy

The 2012 New York City Marathon was scheduled to be held on Sunday, November 4, 2012, however the damage and chaos caused Hurricane Sandy has forced the marathon to be canceled. In the days leading up to the scheduled date of the marathon, race organizers were still scrambling and attempting to make it happen. The 26.2 mile course through each of the city’s five boroughs may have been the easy part had the race gone on. The Huffington Post’s Rachel Cohen reported that organizers were expecting nearly 50,000 participants in this year’s marathon before the storm hit.

The Danger of NFL Replacement Referees

The NFL insists that it does what is in the best interest of the game, the players, and the fans at all times. Yet through the first three weeks of the NFL season, replacement referees from the high school level and lower branches of college football, have been used because of the lockout of the regular officials. After three weeks of replacement referees, everyone seems to have something to say about the NFL and its replacement referees. Dan Shaughnessy of the Boston Globe wrote:

G4S Security Shortfall at London 2012

Many of the security concerns and issues at the 2012 Summer Olympics in London were allegedly caused by G4S Security Company. Richard Allen Greene of CNN reported that the private security firm G4S signed a $444 million dollar government contract to provide 10,400 security personnel for the Olympics. However just weeks before the games G4S came out and admitted they only had 4,000 trained security personnel, and could only have 7,000 ready by opening day of the Olympics. With G4S’s shortfall being a huge issue the government deployed 4,200 extra troops and extra police.

Adidas' miCoach Elite System

This summer Adidas and Major League Soccer announced that the MLS would be using Adidas’ miCoach Elite System throughout the league in 2013. The 2012 MLS All-Star Game was the world’s first “smart game” using the miCoach Elite System. This miCoach system works with a small data cell that fits in a protective pocket on the back of a player’s base layer (shirt? Shorts?). This data cell, along with two more in the athlete’s shoes, transfers data for each athlete to a computer or to a coaches iPad.

NFL Concussion Lawsuits

As recently as July 1, 2012, Greg Rinsling of the Associated Press reported that there were more than 94 pending concussion related lawsuits against the National Football League with over 2,425 players as plaintiffs. These lawsuits are alleging that the NFL hid information that linked football related concussion injuries, even mild ones, to permanent brain injuries. Much of this is due to recent studies detailing the overwhelming evidence that even mild concussions can cause far more severe problems.