Apollo CEO Dave Hancock sat down to talk about the injury numbers nobody in elite sport can explain. Watch the full interview below.
Hamstrings, calves, groins and quads. Soft tissue injuries are climbing across the Premier League, the NBA, the NFL and most major leagues, at exactly the moment sport has more data than it has ever had. In this interview, Dave Hancock argues that the two facts are connected.
Athletes are faster and the demands of the game have gone up, but Dave believes the real problem sits somewhere less comfortable. Force plates, force frames and hamstring testing rigs have given the industry an explosion of numbers, and most of that testing happens seated, non weight bearing, in isolation, in a single plane. Useful for return to play, he says. Useful for knowing where an athlete was before an injury and where they need to get back to. But as an injury prevention tool, flawed, because it is not how the body actually moves.
What gets missed is the cheat. The body stabilises in order to mobilise, and when it cannot stabilise the lumbar spine or the pelvis, it finds another way to move. Those adaptations are why an ACL becomes a recurring hamstring problem, and why a groin issue turns into a calf issue two seasons later. In Dave's view, no athlete ever fully rehabilitates. They find a way back, and the small discrepancies that come with it compound over a career.
He also sets out what he would change if he walked back into a performance director role tomorrow, including a dedicated injury prevention department sitting between medical and S&C, led by someone who understands pathology.
The second half of the conversation covers the Blind Screen. Fifteen years ago Dave became more interested in why an injury happened than in fixing it, and started assessing athletes completely blind, with no history and no conversation, to strip out clinical bias. After roughly 1,600 screens, the findings kept matching injuries he had not been told about. That work became the AI model now built into Apollo, which teams are taught to run themselves, flagging the highest risk athletes in a squad of 60 or 70 and generating the individual corrective work each one needs.
His answer on whether injury prevention can be turned around is short. One hundred percent.
