A few hours before the second game of the Israeli Basketball Premier League last season, a helicopter landed on the roof of Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center’s Ichilov Hospital, carrying soldiers wounded in the intense fighting in Gaza.
Orthopedist Dr. Gil Rachevsky, who also serves as a physician for the Maccabi Tel Aviv basketball team, entered the operating room. “I told myself I might make it to the second half since there were a few hours until the game,” he recalls. “In the end, we came out of the operating room, and I saw that the game had just started.
“And I think to myself: People have lost it, it’s unbelievable. We, who just treated casualties suffering from burns, young soldiers who fought in battle, see people in the arena throwing flare torches at each other, and think about those images of burns and the damage that can be caused.”
Dr. Guy Morag is the senior physician of Maccabi Tel Aviv basketball and the senior figure in Ichilov’s orthopedic department. He brought Rachevsky on board 14 years ago, and since then they’ve been through a lot together, especially on sports fields and treating victims of electric scooters and bicycles on Tel Aviv’s sidewalks.
No one, of course, prepared them for Oct. 7. That day turned them into a unique category: sports doctors who treat both soldiers from the battlefield and athletes, often on the same day.
“There’s no precedent for this in other parts of the world,” Morag smiles. “We’re probably the first to combine these things. In the morning, we treat young soldiers, and in the evening, we go to the basketball court.”
Q: Let’s go back to Oct. 7 for a moment. The EuroLeague basketball season had just begun.
Morag: “Yes, we had a game against Partizan Belgrade two days earlier. On that Saturday afternoon, we were already treating the wounded. We started to understand and see things we hadn’t seen before, like all Israelis, I guess.”
Rachevsky: “Our players here understood that something was happening and started asking questions, and basketball suddenly seemed so far away for everyone.”
Q: What were the reactions of your foreign colleagues?
Morag: “Very quickly, we received offers of help from all the EuroLeague doctors—well, except for the Turks with whom we’re not in contact, and relations had not been good even before. The others immediately reached out to us and asked what they could do. And when we played in Belgrade, the local doctors were always there for us in whatever we needed.”
Rachevsky: “At first, we couldn’t fly because doctors couldn’t leave the country due to the situation, so we relied a lot on foreign help. When we resumed flying to Europe with the team, there was this strange change of atmosphere, when you know what’s happening in the country and abroad, we’re busy with basketball.”
Q: With the return to routine, we also returned to the dark side of sports—you talked about coming out of the operating room and then seeing fans attacking each other.
Morag: “After October 7, there was a feeling that something had changed, people behaved differently. By the way, even when we returned to the sports fields, you felt there was a very big change.
“But when we got to the end-of-season games, it was clear that everything had returned to how it was. The fans returned to their previous poor behavior.”
Q: In the room next to us sits Assaf Bibas, who is the medical director of the rival Hapoel Tel Aviv basketball team—maybe the fans need to remember what’s important?
Rachevsky: “We worked with Assaf together even before Oct. 7, consulting even when we were only dealing with sports. And certainly, after that black Saturday.”
Morag: “We miss dealing only with sports orthopedics, where the emotional effort is completely different. It’s different emotional level when you see a young man struggling to return to normal, to stand on his feet again. With all due respect to an athlete for whom this is his job, here a person is fighting just to be able to walk.”
Q: And if I still ask you for a comparison between treating a soldier and treating an athlete?
Rachevsky: “As far as I’m concerned, I’ve seen young soldiers here in the last nine months doing amazing things. We wanted them to return to walking, to manage an independent lifestyle, and they tell us they want to return to the field, to their friends, to fight. Despite the situation, they radiate optimism, that they won’t settle for just walking again.”
Morag: “In that sense, it was really like seeing athletes who do everything to return to play after an injury. And then to improve the range of motion, and another small improvement. Like an athlete who doesn’t want to stop improving, who’s willing to make more and more effort to be stronger. It’s a determination we’ve encountered here with our soldiers more than once.”
Q: Sports medicine in general has obviously improved over the years, what’s the situation in this country?
Morag: “We’re progressing a lot and there are very good doctors here, but we can’t compare to the world’s top. We studied abroad and saw the professional environment that sports teams have: the number of doctors and the support staff they have. This is obviously not something we have in this country.”
Rachevsky: “Look at Israeli basketball, for example. Apart from the three big teams [Maccabi Tel Aviv, Hapoel Tel Aviv and Hapoel Jerusalem], that invest at an international level in support staff and understand the importance of a large medical team, the rest of the teams are not like that, and it’s a shame.
“A good medical team in the era we live in, with a large number of games, with the money paid to stars, is worth a lot of money to teams. The medical envelope takes care of everything: from nutrition, through how flying affects the body, and of course rehabilitation. I very much hope that this will change in the coming years and all Israeli sports will rise in level.”
Originally published by Israel Hayom.
