Medical care in unlicensed combat sports: A need for standardised regulatory frameworks.

OBJECTIVES: To explore the provision of medical care at 'unlicensed', full-contact amateur and lower-level professional combat sports competitions in England. DESIGN: Qualitative, mixed methods. METHODS: Observations totalling 200h of fieldwork shadowing medical professionals at 27 individual combat sports events, alongside formal, semi-structured interviews with 25 medical professionals, 7 referees and 9 promoters/event staff. RESULTS: Practices and standards vary widely. Event organisers and promoters often have very little understanding of how different types of medical practitioners operate. They rarely, if ever, check that the staff they are hiring are qualified, sometimes resulting in unqualified staff being used to provide medical cover at events. Venues are often poorly equipped to accommodate basic medical procedures. Patient confidentiality is very often compromised. Medical professionals often have limited autonomy within the combat sports milieu and may find themselves marginalised, with their judgements overruled by non-medical staff during competitive events. Some practitioners are cognisant of the dangers such working environments pose to their professional reputations and livelihoods, but remain working within combat sports regardless. CONCLUSIONS: Despite pockets of good practice, the lack of standardised rules for medical care provision creates substantial risks to athletes, to practitioners and the standing of the profession. The development and implementation of standardised, enforceable regulatory frameworks for full-contact combat sports in England is urgently needed.

"It is what it is": masculinity, homosexuality, and inclusive discourse in mixed martial arts.

In this article we make use of inclusive masculinity theory to explore online media representations of male homosexuality and masculinity within the increasingly popular combat sport of mixed martial arts (MMA). Adopting a case-study approach, we discuss narratives constructed around one aspirational male MMA fighter, Dakota Cochrane, whose history of having participated in gay pornography became a major talking point on a number of MMA discussion/community Web sites during early 2012. While these narratives attempted to discursively rescue Cochrane's supposedly threatened masculinity, highlighting both his "true" heterosexuality and his prodigious fighting abilities, they also simultaneously celebrated the acceptance of homosexual men within the sport that Cochrane's case implied. Thus, we suggest that these media representations of homosexuality and masculinity within MMA are indicative of declining cultural homophobia and homohysteria and an inclusive vision of masculinity, as previously described by proponents of inclusive masculinity theory.