The FAIR IOC committee consensus: providing guidelines for injury prevention for female athletes
By Laura Beldor, February 6 2026—
In 2025, 109 experts from around the world came together in Lausanne Switzerland for the Female/woman/girl Athlete Injury Prevention (FAIR) International Olympic Committee (IOC) Consensus to decide the best ways to improve the rate of serious injury for women and girls in sports. From this conference, the group published 56 recommendations to promote the safety of female athletes.
Dr. Carolyn Emery, physiotherapist and epidemiologist at the University of Calgary, was a co-lead of the committee. She sat down with the Gauntlet to discuss FAIR and the results of the conference.
Women’s sports are currently in the spotlight with leagues, such as Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) and the Professional Women’s Hockey League (PWHL) being more popular than ever, encouraging more girls to take up a sport. One major issue that these female athletes face across various disciplines is the high risk of serious injury, suffering from certain traumas at higher rates than their male counterparts.
“Women and girls are at a higher risk of injuries such as knee injuries and anterior cruciate ligament injuries that can have long-term consequences,” said Emery. “There’s lots of different reasons for this — it might be biological, gender or context related.”
These concerns are exacerbated by the disproportionately small amount of studies and data on women and girls in sports injury. Whether through funding or interest, men’s sports has often been prioritized for data collection, as a majority of studies on sports injuries have been on male athletes. This has resulted in the data from male-centered studies often being seen as the default by which all recommendations and regulations for sports are based. This “one size fits all” approach has resulted in women being underrepresented in sports research, which has made it difficult to accurately address injury prevention for women and girls.
“The [research] funding has ultimately been focused on men,” said Emery. “We can’t be making decisions for female athletes from data collected from men and boys”.
FAIR was formed in order to address these major issues on an international scale. The committee, funded by the IOC, consists of health and sports professionals from around the world. The group utilized their collective expertise to develop a list of recommendations through a consensus method co-developed by Emery and Dr. Kay M. Crossley of La Trobe University. The process began in 2023 with identifying the needed prevention methods then creating evidence reviews — the final vote on which recommendations would be published took place March 31 to April 2, 2025.
With a research program that is focused on injury prevention in youth, Emery’s work is often informed by the data gathered through her collaboration with athletes and sports organizations. Along with the IOC, she has ties with Hockey Canada, Rugby Canada as well as other national federations for her evidence-based research. Her work with these organizations aided in identifying the changes and needed to promote health and safety of women and girls in sport.
“It’s really important to ensure that the priorities that we see as researchers and the clinical priorities are also backed up by priorities of the associations,” said Emery. “If that’s true, and you work together through an integrated approach, then you’re working on the research that will inform solutions to prevent injuries.”
The FAIR committee’s finalized list of recommendations features a variety of injury prevention strategies, from requiring certain training regiments such as neuromuscular warm-ups, to mandating the personal protective equipment such as mouthguards and helmets. The guidelines also suggest methods to implement injury prevention strategies, foster supportive environments for female/girl/women athletes as well as the prioritization of gender/sex-specific research.
Feasibility was a significant consideration for the committee while developing their guidelines, designing their recommendations so that they can be implemented by individual female athletes and those that support them. Emery also plans on creating a website to translate the committee’s suggestions for the various levels of sport for further accessibility and convenience.
The work done by Emery and the FAIR committee highlight the need for change within female/women/girls sports. The guidelines and recommendations are a significant step in repairing the disparity in gender/sex of injury prevention.