An Australian hockey player has opted to amputate part of a finger so he can play in the Paris Olympics.
Matt Dawson has seriously injured a finger after being hit with a hockey stick during a practice session two weeks before he was due to represent his country at his third Games. The incident left the top of the ring finger on his right hand completely shattered, putting his Olympic plans in jeopardy.
Instead of undergoing surgery, which would have meant a two-month recovery, the 30-year-old made the drastic decision to remove part of his finger from the knuckle up.
“The finger injury was pretty bad. When people around you see it and don’t say anything, you obviously know it’s pretty bad,” Dawson told CNN Sport.
“Everything started moving pretty fast. All I remember is someone saying to me, ‘We need to see a plastic surgeon.’”
The impact left Dawson’s finger in such bad shape that “the surgeon said he was very lucky it was still holding on.”
The two-time Olympian, who was part of the Australian team that won a silver medal at the Tokyo Olympics, fainted when he saw how badly his finger was in the locker room after the incident. He assumed his dream of competing in Paris was all but over.
Desperate to find a way to compete at the Games, Dawson sought advice from a plastic surgeon who warned he might not regain full function of his finger even with reconstructive surgery, which would have required placing a wire through the bone.
But he was presented with an alternative option: if part of his leg was amputated, there was a chance he could play again in 10 days.
“I’m definitely closer to the end of my career than the beginning and who knows, this could be my last (Olympics), and if I felt like I could still perform at my best, that’s what I would do,” Dawson told the Parlez Vous Hockey podcast. “If cutting off the tip of my finger was the price I had to pay, that’s what I would do.”
In a remarkable turn of events, he is expected to play for Australia against Argentina on Saturday, just 16 days after being injured.
Coach Colin Batch said: “He has certainly set the bar high for anyone who breaks a finger in the future but hats off to Matt – he has made that decision and is obviously very committed to playing in Paris.”
His teammates were stunned by the news of his partial amputation. “We didn’t really know what to think, and then we found out that he had gone to the hospital and cut off his finger, which was quite interesting because I know sometimes there are people who would give an arm, a leg and even a bit of a finger to be here,” Aran Zalewski, the Australian captain, said at a news conference in Paris.
It is not the first time Dawson has suffered a serious injury. He nearly lost an eye after being hit by a hockey stick in the build-up to the 2018 Commonwealth Games, but recovered in time to represent the Kookaburras at the tournament, where the team won gold.
