Exploding ball at Virgin gym breaks ribs of weightlifter

Virgin Active was fined £10,000 for the injuries caused to James Allen, 49, at its branch in the Strand after a health and safety case brought by Westminster council.

Mr Allen, a management consultant with Bain & Co, was sitting on an inflatable stability ball to lift bar weights as part of his morning routine when he came crashing to the ground.

The bodybuilder, who is 6ft 5in tall and weighs 19 stone, was lifting freeweights using a green rubber ball to give greater stability to tone his shoulders and abdominal muscles.

He heard a "big bang". "It just disappeared from beneath me," he said. Paramedics put Mr Allen into a neck brace and took him to St Thomas'
Hospital in Waterloo.

Mr Allen, of Richmond, said: "I was lifting 80kg on the ball and it just burst. The doctor told me that if I had been three years older the damage could have killed me. I couldn't breathe properly for a long time after."

He had broken ribs, a collapsed right lung, fluid on the lungs, a damaged jaw and a bruised back and chest. He was put on morphine and two years later still needs physiotherapy.

"My lungs took for ever to repair but the consequences are bigger," he said. "The issue is that these things are used everywhere and nobody knows these non-burst guarantees are rubbish.

"These balls are used in hospitals and used by pregnant women and there is no guarantee they won't burst at all."

Mr Allen was working with a personal trainer, Gareth Degg, at the gym, which costs up to £90 a month.

Virgin Active pleaded guilty to breaching the duty of care it had to Mr Allen under the Health and Safety Act at Westminster magistrates' court.

Virgin Active's barrister, Mark Balysz, said the company accepted the "deficiencies" in its risk assessment and blamed the firm's former health and safety manager for carrying out an incomplete assessment. He told the court that staff were not aware of the "fallacy" that the ball would not burst so any checks made were "not made in the knowledge that if it was scratched, scuffed or cut it could burst".

Richard Block, health and safety manager at Westminster council, said: "All employers have a duty of care to those they employee and for visitors to their premises."