A modelisation of quantification of head and neck risks associated with tackles in rugby union

44th Congress of the Société de Biomécanique, Poitiers, FRANCE, 28-/10/2019 - 30/10/2019Recent news in Rugby Union highlight the necessity to prevent concussions and injuries during training and matches. The number of concussions has indeed been reported to increase in the last decades (Finch et al. 2013). This is mostly due to the anatomy of professional rugby players (muscular development, higher body mass index- BMI).While the rugby union rules have been changing to promote safer practice in scrum, the players get highly injured during tackles (Fuller et al. 2010). Multiple influences on injury risks, such as the impact conditions or the player's morphology, have not been fully studied. In tackling, both the tackler (T) and the ball carrier (BC), their morphology and initial position need to be studied to fully describe the tackle impacts. Experimentally, on field data can be acquired with sensors and epidemiological studies have been carried to correlate the type of injury with the impact conditions (Kuster et al. 2012