The Safety of Sports Reporters: From Morones Prieto Avenue to the Stadium Tunnel

Alma De la Rosa and Cristo Morales stood at the edge of Morones Prieto Avenue in Monterrey, Nuevo León, Mexico. They had come to do a familiar job: capture images of a landslide that had just occurred on one of the city's main arteries. De la Rosa was the field reporter. Morales carried the camera. Behind them, traffic kept threading through an area that had only been partially cordoned off. Then a pickup truck lost control and plowed straight into the spot where the two were working. According to initial reports, the 19-year-old driver was cut off by another vehicle and lost control of the wheel. The impact left Morales with a broken leg and multiple soft-tissue injuries. At the same moment, at that very landslide site, a motorcyclist was also injured. By the time the report was published, Monterrey authorities had not yet determined definitive responsibility. City public-service units, including Public Services, Traffic Police and Civil Protection, were on scene. Reading that line brought memories rushing back to my mornings at the edge of the Paris FC training ground, standing a few steps from where equipment carts rolled past. People usually picture sports reporting as VIP stands, air-conditioned press rooms, credentials hanging across the chest. Few picture that most of our time is spent on roadsides, in corridors, in places where a runaway vehicle can turn into disaster in an instant. The Monterrey incident reminded me of the essence of the work I have pursued for four decades: standing where events happen, among things that move faster than human reflexes. I joined the sports desk of Belgrade Television in 2026. Back then, the first lesson I was taught was not how to write a lead, but how to stand. Where to stand so as not to block a colleague's view. Where to stand so as not to walk into a live television frame. Where to stand so that when a ball flies out of bounds, I would not become the person it hits in the face. That discipline sounded trivial. It became the foundation of everything that followed. Thirty-eight years later, I still keep that habit. In the stadium tunnel, the noise cuts out completely. Only the heartbeat of the match remains. I learned that every working space has its own rhythm, and the reporter who survives thousands of scenes is the one who reads that rhythm before it changes. In Monterrey, the rhythm changed in an instant. A car was cut off, a driver lost control, and the safety margin the reporters thought they had simply vanished. What stands out is that the reporter and cameraman were not careless. They were placed in danger because that is the nature of live field reporting. To capture images of a landslide, you must stand near the landslide. To capture the sound of a scene, you must be inside the scene. There is no way to do this job from a distance. Mexico is one of the countries with the lowest-rated press-safety environments in the world. International press-freedom organizations have for years placed Mexico among the most dangerous nations for journalists, with murder and disappearance figures higher than most countries without armed conflict. Most cases are tied to organized crime and local corruption. But there is another risk group rarely discussed: pure occupational accidents while working an active scene. The Morones Prieto Avenue incident belongs to that second group. There was no sign of a deliberate attack. There was a chain of negligence and dangerous conditions: a landslide not yet fully handled, a road still open to traffic, a motorcyclist already injured at the same location, and a 19-year-old driver who lost control. Each element alone was preventable. Combined, they created a safety blind spot. To me, this story carries a deeper professional layer, because I work in a field people often forget is also a scene. A football match is a mass event in an enclosed or semi-enclosed space. It has tens of thousands of spectators, hundreds of staff, dozens of vehicles coming and going, high-pressure lighting, steep stairways, and movement flows designed for crowds rather than individuals. Sports reporters are one of the few groups present in almost every zone: press room, technical area, tunnel, mixed zone, parking lot, and sometimes the training ground itself. I have worked eight Olympic Games, eight World Cups, and many editions of the Giro d'Italia and the Tour de France. Each event type has its own risk profile. At the World Cup, the biggest risk is not on the pitch. It is in the movement flows between stadium and media center, in shuttle buses crossing the city at rush hour, in crowded fan zones. In Russia in 2026, I traveled with the France national team as an observer. Some evenings I left the stadium at midnight, and the journey back to the hotel was scarier than any passage of play. Players like Kylian Mbappé or Antoine Griezmann stepped off the team bus flanked by two lines of security. Reporters like us found our own way home. At the Tour de France, the risk is in the peloton itself. A group of cyclists descends a mountain pass at over seventy kilometers per hour, followed by hundreds of escort, technical, medical and media vehicles. Photographers often stand at the roadside, less than two meters from the riders, to get the best angle. Every season, someone gets hurt. At the Giro d'Italia, I once watched an organizer's motorcycle strike a photographer as the peloton came through a curve. The photographer fell, his camera shattered. He got up. But the distance between getting up and not getting up was a few centimeters. That is the kind of risk no one records in a report, no one tallies, no one fully insures. What catches my attention is that in this industry we have abundant data on player injury risk but very little on the risk facing the people who report. We know how many kilometers a midfielder runs per match, how many accelerations he makes, how much his hamstring-injury risk rises when the schedule thickens. But we have almost no system to record occupational accidents for reporters, camera operators and technicians. That is a real data gap. In my work, I believe what is not measured does not improve. In 2026, I spent four months in isolation reviewing thirty-eight Paris FC matches and writing a thirty-page report on how the team conceded goals. Thirty pages save no one, but whoever reads them keeps the rhythm. I believe the same principle applies to occupational safety: to change anything, you must start by counting. Count the times a reporter must stand in a live traffic zone. Count the scenes without barriers. Count the one-person crews. Those numbers, recorded long enough, will force newsrooms to change their procedures. There is a technical detail in how the Monterrey incident reached me, and I think it is worth telling. The item was initially labeled as football in an automated classification system. The entire content contained no club, player, coach, competition or match. Only a traffic accident in Monterrey. The likely reason was geography: Monterrey is home to Mexico's two top-flight clubs, CF Monterrey and Tigres UANL. A keyword-and-location system labeled by region, not by meaning. I tell this detail because it mirrors a mistake humans make too. We label everything by familiar surfaces. A reporter in Monterrey is struck by a truck while working, and the system sees Monterrey and thinks football. People do the same. We see the credential, the stand, the camera, and immediately think of a glamorous profession. That wrong label is a perfect metaphor for how the public misunderstands sports reporting. We are used to the image of a sports reporter sitting in a press room, asking the coach about the starting lineup. That image is real, but it is only the tip. The submerged part is thousands of hours standing where there is no chair, in rain, in sun, in hospital corridors waiting for injury news, in parking lots at two in the morning waiting for the team bus. A real sports reporter is not the one present at the prettiest place. He is the one present at the most necessary place, at the most necessary moment. The training ground does not lie. It only waits for someone who knows how to listen. There is a rarely admitted truth: most of our occupational risk does not come from deliberate attacks. It comes from runaway vehicles, wet curves, crowds that suddenly change direction, safety procedures cut to save costs. The sports-media industry has changed profoundly over twenty years. The number of sports reporters at major outlets has fallen sharply. Agencies must do more with fewer people. A reporter who once had a three-person crew now shoots, photographs and writes alone. Workload rises, preparation time falls, and on-scene risk-assessment time is close to zero. That is why someone like Cristo Morales could be alone with a camera at the edge of an open avenue. In a larger crew, there might have been a safety officer, a traffic spotter, a person with the authority to pull back when conditions worsened. But small crews have no one doing that. When a newsroom cuts staff, the first to go is usually the person who does not directly produce content. The safety officer is the first to leave, because safety generates no views. There is another angle I want to make clear, because it relates directly to how I view Monterrey. In football, we are used to the language of metrics. We talk about xG, accurate passes, distance covered. I use those numbers every day. But I have also for years warned that xG has been abused. It cannot explain a referee's decision, cannot explain a player's form, and certainly cannot explain why a 19-year-old driver lost control on an avenue where people were working. The lesson here is that data only has value when it measures the right thing. A classification system that labels a traffic accident as football has measured the wrong thing. A newsroom that assesses occupational risk by intuition rather than numbers has also measured the wrong thing. Both errors stem from the same habit: looking at a familiar surface and concluding. In my file, there is a story I tell again and again. In the summer of 2026, I wrote a long piece on the Paris FC academy and happened to watch a U17 friendly. There was Mathis Diallo, sixteen years old, of Malian origin, a central midfielder, completing forty-seven of fifty-four passes, eighty-seven percent, along with nine successful tackles. That rough gem did not sparkle, but I knew I was looking at something breathing. The academy president read the piece, invited me to be an unpaid training-ground observer, and gave me access every morning from six o'clock. I tell that story not to talk about myself. I tell it to say that the true value of a professional sometimes lies where others do not look. No one paid me to stand at the edge of the training ground at six in the morning. No one paid Cristo Morales to stand at the edge of a landslide on an open avenue. But without people like that, the public would have no stories to read. In Monterrey, authorities have not determined definitive responsibility. That is right and necessary. An accident involving a 19-year-old driver, an injured motorcyclist and two hospitalized media workers is a stack of events that requires careful investigation, not rushed conclusions. In my profession, I learned a principle in 2026: clearly distinguish what should be public from what should stay private. I once knew in advance of a tactical change by the France team at the Russia World Cup and did not write a single line about it. That patience later brought me internal sources no other reporter had. The same principle applies to the Monterrey story. What we know for certain is that two journalists were injured while working. What we do not know is who bears final responsibility. Between those two points is a gap that a responsible professional must not fill with speculation. What I take from Monterrey is not fear. It is a new way of posing a question for every assignment: where is the rhythm of this space changing, and am I standing in the right place to notice it. Four decades in the trade taught me that a reporter's value lies not in being present at the most dazzling moments, but in still being present to retell ordinary ones. To do that, the reporter must remain standing. There are mornings when I record a player's footsteps, as if writing a wordless score. Those mornings can only exist if I am still healthy enough to stand there. Occupational safety is not an exciting topic. It is the condition that allows every other topic to be told. A sports-media industry that does not protect its reporters is an industry erasing the very stories it exists to tell. And if you have read this far, perhaps the next time you watch a match you will notice, at the edge of the frame, a person keeping the rhythm of the story you are watching. That person stands where a runaway vehicle can arrive at any moment. The issue is no longer whether an accident will happen. The issue is whether we can design a process so that reporters do not have to pay in flesh and blood for doing their job.