Alongside all the other memories taken home from their stay in Germany this summer to cheer on their national team, 38,000 soccer fans are now certified in CPR.
The Get Trained, Save Lifes, campaign was a partnership between the EURO Championships and the European Resuscitation Council to raise awareness of sudden cardiac arrest and the importance of bystander CPR.
At official CPR booths, fans from all 24 participating countries practiced on manikins with sensors that measured the depth and rhythm of their compressions.
Their results were compared with other participants in the form of a computer game. Football greats like Clarence Seedorf, Javi Martinez, Ruud Gullit, and Mikel John Obi visited the booths to interact and participate in the game.
In addition to fans, the participating EURO 2024 teams have also received life-saving training at their base camps. The initiative has been extended to match officials, staff, and volunteers working at the tournament, to try and ensure that no matter where an event might occur, someone will be around who knows what to do.
The EUROS have a recent and dramatic history in raising awareness for cardiac arrest, more than the council could have ever hoped to generate on their own.
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In the European Championships of 2020, the sporting world watched in horror as a dozen paramedics charged onto the field to try and save Denmark’s attacking midfielder.
Christian Erikson had the ball at his feet before collapsing for seemingly no reason. Simon Kjaer, the captain, ran over and determined that his colleague’s heart had stopped. In those crucial moments, Kjaer cleared Erikson’s airways before performing the first few chest compressions, alerting the tens of thousands of fans in the stadium, and the millions watching around the world, to what was happening.
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The Danish players locked arms around their teammate to screen the view of what was happening, but the eagle-eyed television cameras still captured footage of Erikson’s limp body twitching on the ground from the compressions. The terrifying ordeal lasted several minutes before he was transported off the pitch in a medical vehicle, after which he made a full recovery.
The sporting world had had its eyes pinned open to the reality of what can be done to save a person on the very edge of oblivion, and soon, Sky Sports was welcoming paramedics onto their show to teach basic resuscitation skills.
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