Exciting night of ultimate

Two great games of ultimate¹ this week: a huge comeback, interesting opponents, and a non-serious but extremely bloody injury.

Also, I was really happy with my fitness, which may finally be back up to where it was before my health troubles started in 2014.

Game 1 was just a particularly great comeback game. We were down 12-5 at the half. When we resumed, we started scoring three points for every one of theirs, and we won 21-15: impressive and fun!

Game 2 was most unusual, against a lady-only team. League ultimate is co-ed by tradition, but there’s no maximum number of female players. This team is a bunch of competitive women that decided to see how they’d do against regular mixed teams. They were so much fun to play against! Super skilled. But not skilled enough. My team is pretty good, and we won that one too, fairly handily, 21-10.

And near the end… ouch! An extremely hard throw of mine hit a girl in the face! It wasn’t a reckless throw, just an ordinary hard throw, intended for a more distant target and too low for it. She tried to block it head-on, about 15 metres away from me. She got bumped by someone else, which threw her off slightly, and the disc hit her in the face. I ran over to her and all I could see was that she was covering her eye and blood was pouring out of her hand. Not dripping, but an actual continuous stream of blood, which I’m not sure I’ve ever seen before. Horrifying.

But it was just an eyebrow wound, not her eye. Phew! Stitches for sure, but she’ll be just fine.

That’s most blood I’ve seen in ulti since a memorable incident in 2001. In that case, the throw was reckless. A huge male player leaned way out over the sideline and threw a hard throw right into a female spectactor only about 5m away from him, hitting her in the mouth and shattering most of her front teeth. 175g of plastic can do a lot of damage. That was by far the nastiest injury I’ve ever seen in the sport.