May 08, 2004

I'm surprised you can get a fatal head injury in a "Not high-speed accident" while wearing a helmet. Remember that this is a sport where "high-speed" means going faster than you can legally drive your car. "Not high-speed", for these kids, could well be in excess of 40 MPH. At that speed, if you hit something solid with your head in a direct blow (as opposed to rapping it on the ground in a glancing blow, say), even wearing a helmet, you're likely to be severely injured. The purpose of the helmet is to mitigate the severity of injuries: hopefully, it might mean the difference between a skull fracture and a concussion, or a concussion and a bad headache. It doesn't make you bulletproof, however. Ski racers race wearing a helmet, a pair of stiff boots...and, other than that, practically nothing but a shiny set of underwear. Sometimes they wear some kevlar back armor, but compared to other sports (including ones that don't involve such high speeds), there's not much protective gear. With all that, fatalities are suprisingly rare in alpine ski racing. To paraphrase Picabo Street, once in a great while someone gets killed; usually, though, they just get hurt real bad. There were two fatalities in World Cup training about a year apart, fall 2002 and 2003, and both were head injuries. The last World Cup fatality that I know of before that was in 1994 or so, and it was similar: person hit solid object (a TV tower) at high speed. According to an article in Ski Racing, "no team athlete has been killed on the hill since a jumper, Jeff Wright, died near Brattleboro, Vermont, in 1975." Freaky...I know the jump hill they're talking about. 17 years old... man that just sucks. Yes, it does. She was an extremely promising athlete, and a young person with a lot of life ahead of her. For anyone who feels so moved, an article on the US Ski Team website asks that "In lieu of flowers, the Glover family asked that donations be made to either Burke Mountain Academy or to the Shelley Glover Fund, U.S. Ski Team Foundation."

posted by lil_brown_bat at 10:50 AM on May 09, 2004

I wonder why downhill skiers can't wear equipment similar to motorcycle racing suits? They wouldn't need the leathers, but a full face helmet (they're already wearing goggles, why not go for the increased protection?), spine protector and ballistic impact plates at the joints would make a world of difference in a crash. They could still use the spandex material between the armor to maintain flexibility.* Downhill skiers do wear a helmet that has a chin bumper; that, plus the goggles, covers most of the face. What that saves you from, mostly, is face rash (although if you're crazy enough to boot-top a gate at those speeds, you're likely to end up with a facial cut as a souvenir, "full face" or no). Again, neither bike helmets nor ski helmets make you bulletproof. If you fall off a bike going 80 MPH -- a speed that skiers reach in speed events -- and you take a direct hit on the head, you'll sustain a serious injury. As for the other stuff, racers do sometimes wear "ninja turtle" back protectors and the like...but they're limited in what they can wear by safety regulations, believe it or not. 30 years or so, they found out the hard way that speed suits made of certain types of material had so little friction that when a racer crashed, he/she wouldn't slow down while sliding over the snow. The unintentional crash test dummy was wearing a neoprene suit, IIRC, and the results were truly ugly. So now, World Cup racers undergo what's semi-humorously referred to as the "underwear check", in which all layers of the athlete's clothing is tested for the amount of air that will pass through. What this has to do with how fast you slide, or why they bother to include underlying protective layers, is beyond me...but I don't make the rules. Bottom line, ski racers can and sometimes do wear protective gear, but they also can and sometimes do get slammed for wearing it. Daron Rahlves, last year's Hahnenkammsieger and a member of the US Ski Team, got smacked for this last season, IIRC. IMO it's a stupid, dangerous rule, and it's a horrible irony that racers are forced to choose between safety and possible disqualification for breaking a "safety" rule.

posted by lil_brown_bat at 09:50 PM on May 09, 2004

While protective gear sounds like a good idea the truth of the matter is that it isn't going to help you. If you are going 60 - 70 MPH, a kevlar jacket isn't going to mean a damn thing when you hit a tree. Most severe injuries in ski racing are caused by torsional forces that protective gear can't save you from. Not torsional forces, nor direct high-speed contact between your head and a hard stationary object, as you point out. Where the ninja-turtle stuff might possibly be helpful is in preventing an injury to the thoracic spine, since those types of injuries are usually caused by a direct blow to the back (like if you flew through the air and landed on your back). I have no idea what the incidence of such injuries is in ski racing, though, so this could well be a case of trying to prevent something that doesn't happen. In the end it's only because safety is the first priority on these couses that more people arn't killed. In fact, I think that ski racing has benefited from motorcycle racing safety -- I think the airwalls you see in some ski races originated in bike races. It has made a huge difference. And, FWIW, the two training fatalities I alluded to above were, well...Stupid Shit, it must be said. Cases of really bad human error. In both cases, someone who should have known better simply walked out onto a (supposedly) closed course while downhill training was in progress...and stepped right in front of a racer who was going much, much too fast to stop. Result: person who caused the accident was badly hurt, and the racer (who hit them headfirst) was killed.

posted by lil_brown_bat at 09:46 PM on May 10, 2004