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World Cup racing safety discussion

Bruno Schull

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@CascadeConcrete. I get it. My main sport is climbing--ice climbing, mountaineering, alpine rock climbing, glacier travel, and so on. Before climbing, I did bicycle road racing for 15 years. Road racing and riding: now that's a sport where the very real risks are not always appreciated! Road riding/racing is way more dangerous than mountain biking, probably more dangerous than climbing. So, I do understand the risks, and the impossibility of completely eliminating risk in ski racing. But more could be done. And why wouldn't we want to do more?

Here is a simple idea: Make it illegal to hit, or even come close, to gates during races. Change the race course (a little) to accommodate the new turn shapes, paint different lines on the snow, and disqualify racers if they try to cut corners, so to speak, and come close to or hit gates. Athletes would adapt. Races would be safer. It wouldn't be much harder to set up courses, it wouldn't cost much money, and so on.

Here's another idea. I wish one of the big players (Atomic, Salomon, Volk, Head, whatever) would get onto the band wagon with a knee binding or something like it. Without getting into a whole debate about the knee bindings, its history, its pros and cons, the specific injuries it does and does not protect from, I think it's clear that designs such as the knee binding mitigate one kind of knee ligament injury, and adding another direction of release to bindings is a good idea. The skis stay on athletes feet because bindings such as this necessitate a dedicated right and left ski. The inside and outside edges of skis do different things anyway, so maybe the way forward would be a knee binding type mechanism, and dedicated right and left skis with appropriate shaping, edge profiles, tuning, and what not. If it prevented one ruptured ligament on the WC circuit per year, it would be worth the change. And if that technology trickled down to everyday skiers, it could make a real difference.
 

CascadeConcrete

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Here is a simple idea: Make it illegal to hit, or even come close, to gates during races. Change the race course (a little) to accommodate the new turn shapes, paint different lines on the snow, and disqualify racers if they try to cut corners, so to speak, and come close to or hit gates.

See but the problem here is that you've now made the question of whether the racer legally completed the course a judgement call if you say it's illegal to "even come close" to the gates. How close is too close? Today the rule is that the skis must pass inside the gate (for the record, the paint on the course is meaningless and only there to help racers find the line, it doesn't matter if you ski outside it) and that is a very cut and dried, yes or no question. Furthermore, as someone who has done some very amateur racing (mostly GS, not speed), hitting the gates itself isn't particularly dangerous (unless you straddle, but that's mostly an SL issue) when you intend to do it. It's when you're already out of control and smack into one that it can make a bad situation worse. And nothing about telling racers not to hit the gates will prevent an out of control skier from hitting one during a crash. Imho, this rule both fails to actually address a real problem, and also undermines the objectivity of the sport.

Here's another idea. I wish one of the big players (Atomic, Salomon, Volk, Head, whatever) would get onto the band wagon with a knee binding or something like it. Without getting into a whole debate about the knee bindings, its history, its pros and cons, the specific injuries it does and does not protect from, I think it's clear that designs such as the knee binding mitigate one kind of knee ligament injury, and adding another direction of release to bindings is a good idea.

I don't necessarily disagree, anything we can do to make bindings safer should be done. That applies to racers and recreational skiers. That said, you need to remember that racers currently knowingly compromise the release safety of existing bindings because it's generally considered safer to keep the ski on your foot at those speeds and have a chance at recovery, than to fall due to an unnecessary release. At those speeds, you are likely to get hurt one way or another if you crash, whether the ski stays on or not. So they accept that the skis will often stay on with the obscenely high DIN values they use. Anything that potentially compromises the security of the skis on their feet will likely be balked at by the athletes. And you have to realize that even if you give them bindings with an additional release direction, they will crank these bindings way up too. You could try making it illegal to do so, but remember, the athletes are cranking their bindings because it is widely believed to be the safer option.
 
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James

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Fwiw Rick Howell has been working for years on a safer alpine binding that decouples retention and release. (He’s the original kneebinding inventor, but that’s a messy story) The one possibly suited for high force racing and wcup use would run about $1k. If it ever gets produced. They were magnesium shell, now I see it’s titanium. DIN 8-22!! Release has been pushed back to 2023.

The only way you’d see it on wcup is if one of the big ski/binding co’s bought him out. The general argument against such things is if you come out with a “safer” binding, it implies your other different bindings are “dangerous” and may expose you to liability.

 
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Bruno Schull

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@CascadeConcrete--regarding the course/gates, of course you wouldn't leave it arbitrary. You could paint real lines; touch the line, you're out. Have judges with video replay possibilities. Of course they'd skirt that line, and there would be judgement call, but that would be similar to so many other sports. How much of a difference would it make? Who knows, but, like I said, if it saved one season ending or life changing injury per season, it would be worth it. These athletes are are so young. Of course they will take risks. A professional organization should do what it can to make to mitigate those risks.
 

Bruno Schull

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@ James, yes, I'm familiar with some of the story and background, and have had some lively exchanges with Rick Howell. He's a character, for sure, but, undoubtedly, he knows bindings. That's basically what I meant when I said that one of the big guys should just buy him out and move the technology forward. There's really no reason not to go in this direction with bindings and skis, just a conceptual leap to overcome regading left and right skis, institutional intertia, and of course, the big one...investments of time and money. In the meantime...our knees suffer.
 

CascadeConcrete

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[of course you wouldn't leave it arbitrary. You could paint real lines; touch the line, you're out. Have judges with video replay possibilities. Of course they'd skirt that line, and there would be judgement call, but that would be similar to so many other sports. How much of a difference would it make? Who knows, but, like I said, if it saved one season ending or life changing injury per season, it would be worth it.

A line in the snow is really hard to ski up to with just a couple inches of precision. Do we want racers looking down the course or at their feet? And if you're going to set a course where painted lines ultimately decided where you can ski, why have gates a wayward racer could hit at all? The reason we do have them is because they're much easier for racers to see than lines drawn on the snow.

I will say again, that I don't think hitting the gates itself is the issue. You're changing the sport fairly dramatically to fix a problem I'd argue doesn't exist. The problem is when you smack a gate when you're already out of control and no line in the snow will change that. That said, a number of things have been done to make the gates safer: spring-loaded poles that can just be pushed over rather than rigid bamboo, brush bases instead of screw-ins that pull out of the ground easier, flags that aren't attached to the poles so they pull off if a racer skis through the gate, etc. Additional improvements in gate design seem much more likely to actually address the problem, and are also much less intrusive to the sport.
 

Rudi Riet

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...a number of things have been done to make the gates safer: spring-loaded poles that can just be pushed over rather than rigid bamboo, brush bases instead of screw-ins that pull out of the ground easier, flags that aren't attached to the poles so they pull off if a racer skis through the gate, etc.

Of note is that brush bases are not legal at the World Cup level - they still use screw-in bases.

More comments soon - juggling a few hot button non-forum things right now.
 

James

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I mean if you want to employ technology, when a skier loses control, the gates in that section would go flat. Or somehow become non rigid. Air filled pole for example. Once past, they return to normal. Activation could be from the racers airbag sensor or on the course somehow.

However, implementing such a scheme, (if it could even be),without making the gate pole more dangerous is not a simple matter.
 

Bruno Schull

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@Cascade, aside from the intricacies of gates, painted lines, or bindings, I guess this is where we differ: you wrote, "You're changing the sport fairly dramatically to fix a problem I'd argue doesn't exist." I do think a problem exists. I think that ski racing is excessivley dangerous, and that we expose young athlete to great risks that they do not liklely appreciate or understand (how could they--they're only in their 20s!). It's the responsability of the governing bodies and institutions that profit from racing (companies, advertisers) to ensure that racing is as safe as possible. To return to the sport where I became an athlete, it's a lot like bicycle road racing; there is much that can be done to improve rider safety, for example, changing the choice of courses and finishes, as well as they design of finish line barricades. The knowledge is there--the obstacles are money and motivation. And of course there are always voices saying, "The sport won't be the same." But, then again, you don't see road racers riding 300 km over dirt roads int eh alpine passes, carrying all their own equipment, like they used to, do you? Sports evolve, and hopefully they evolve to become safer. People like to see a thrill, to feel a thrill. But I didn't bike race to get a thrill from cheating injury and death, and I doubt many ski racers derive a core part of their racing identity from cheating injury or death either--rather, the possibility of a serious accident is always there, but it's easy to push that possibility away, especially when young, especially with so many pressures--the sport is their whole life, after all. Nor do I derive a thrill from watching these amazing young athletes risk devastating injuries; in fact, it sometimes makes me sick watching them, and I look away. If measures could be put in place to make any crash a minor fall, with very remote chances of injury, I would support that immediately--that is, the risk doesn't add anything to the sport for me. I guess that's why I see the existing risk as a problem. And about those ski edges? I would guess ski racers know excatly where their edges are.
 

CascadeConcrete

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aside from the intricacies of gates, painted lines, or bindings, I guess this is where we differ: you wrote, "You're changing the sport fairly dramatically to fix a problem I'd argue doesn't exist." I do think a problem exists. I think that ski racing is excessivley dangerous, and that we expose young athlete to great risks that they do not liklely appreciate or understand

Perhaps I wasn't clear. Safety in ski racing, as in many sports, is a problem that I would like to see improved (although I believe I'm less optimistic about the amount of risk you can take out of a sport like DH/SG racing). What I was saying above is that I very specifically do not believe hitting gates under normal racing conditions is itself a problem. Racers hit tens, if not hundreds of thousands of gates intentionally over the course of their careers. It's the gates they don't mean to hit (or don't mean to hit in the manner they do) that cause the issues, and telling them not to hit the gates won't prevent them from hitting a gate they didn't mean to to start with.
 

Swede

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Hmm, gates ’construction’ not really an issue or the cause of injury in ski racing. Not saying it never happened, but it’s very rare. A dislocated shoulder here and there. More can be done with surfaces (cancel when not solid enough) and sets (avoid extreme speeds in sections and forces on athletes). Crashing isn’t even the biggest health problem. Ask Teds or any other retired WC athletes back.
 

Rod MacDonald

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It's not exactly what they do, because racers don't shin gates in speed... They wear padding and guards in other places because that's where they contact gates. None of it is designed to, nor capable of preventing bones from snapping. They are for dissipating the worst of an impact, not reinforcing your bone against forces being levered against it. Totally different things.

It IS EXACTLY what they do .
The protection does what it's designed to do.

It's not what or how the racers use them , it's WHAT THE PROTECTOR DOES.

Not intended to prevent broken legs at present, but perfectly capable of being designed to do so or at least seriously reducing the likelihood of this outcome.

No one who wears a helmet believes that it protects completely from injury in any circumstances, but is designed to mitigate injury as much as possible.

To my viewing, it seems that the second racer's leg broke when her leg , lying horizontal on the snow struck the pole at its most rigid point, ie at the surface . A combination of a less rigid pole fixing and some protective shin guard may well have prevented the break.

In terms of the injury suffered, as some have stated, it's probably easier to break a bone or two and recover fully than to damage ligaments ..how fortunate then she was that it was a clean break of the shin , rather than a straight extended knee that hit the pole. That could have been a totally catastrophic smashed knee.


The idea of protective items does not stem from the idea that the racers will use them to race faster / as a technique, but to protect against ACCIDENTAL injury.

The fact that the racers choose to utilise the equipment in such a manner is a secondary issue.

The rules will change as the organisation deems fit. If the athletes do not want to conform , that is their decision to make.
 

dbostedo

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Shin guards would certainly help. I understand their use/purpose in slalom but there's no reason they or stronger versions could not be used to prevent or mitigate injury .
But shin guards prevent pain, bruising, etc. - impact injuries. They don't prevent broken bones and wrenched knees. If you're proposing something that could prevent that, odds are it would be cumbersome enough to affect the skiing too.

Perhaps a relevant example from American football... In some college teams, knee braces are mandatory for offensive lineman; They're the cumbersome kind with metal along the sides of the knee and a hinge. Here's an example:

1614727264587.png


When these players get to the NFL, none of them wear knee braces except in case of protecting an injury. They feel they affect performance too much. I very much suspect the same would hold true with top skiers, that they would resist wearing anything as much as they can.

Could something be developed for skiers knees? Probably, but given the knee motion and how close the 2 knees are, and how they slide past each other, it would be very difficult, IMO.
 

Rod MacDonald

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But shin guards prevent pain, bruising, etc. - impact injuries. They don't prevent broken bones and wrenched knees. If you're proposing something that could prevent that, odds are it would be cumbersome enough to affect the skiing too.

Perhaps a relevant example from American football... In some college teams, knee braces are mandatory for offensive lineman; They're the cumbersome kind with metal along the sides of the knee and a hinge. Here's an example:

View attachment 126386

When these players get to the NFL, none of them wear knee braces except in case of protecting an injury. They feel they affect performance too much. I very much suspect the same would hold true with top skiers, that they would resist wearing anything as much as they can.

Could something be developed for skiers knees? Probably, but given the knee motion and how close the 2 knees are, and how they slide past each other, it would be very difficult, IMO.


But shin guards prevent pain, bruising, etc. - impact injuries. They don't prevent broken bones and wrenched knees.

A bruise is an impact injury. A broken bone is an impact injury which had a higher force. No difference unless you're talking about a spiral fracture which is a binding release failure, not an impact . Same with wrenched knees.

The very suggestion that the knee/shin protection could not be improved sufficiently to give the necessary protection is simply ludicrous. By your own example, the nfl players above would still be wearing leather helmets and pads.
The mere fact that shin protection exists at all is proof of its efficiency. If the racers did not hit the posts with their shins at all, it would never have been developed. If it is effective at preventing injury during an intentional impact at "x" mph , then it is absolutely possible to redesign it to prevent/ reduce injury at (x times 2) or (x times 3)mph , there simply has to be a will to do so, just as a modern NFL helmet is immensely better at shock absorption than the old helmets.

I'm pretty certain that the first ski racer that realised knocking the poles out of the way with their shins was an advantage soon had some kind of padding stuffed down the top of their boots without the rest of the racers knowing.

You see how those players HAVE to wear the knee braces? That's called mandatory. If everyone wears them then it makes no difference to the overall players skill , since they all wear them, and the fastest skier would still be the fastest skier. I also bet that the first time a player does his ACL after deciding not to wear braces anymore rues his decision pretty dramatically.
 

dbostedo

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The very suggestion that the knee/shin protection could not be improved sufficiently to give the necessary protection is simply ludicrous.
I never said they can't be improved - I was just pointing out some difficulties and a similar example with player resistance in another sport.

And yes, I was referring to twisting falls and injuries that aren't due to blunt force where a shin pad is normally worn. A shin pad does nothing for a lower leg twist, for instance. There are some breaks that a pad like that would prevent, but I'd think those aren't usually the ones that occur to ski racers in a crash.
 

hbear

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I'm all for trying to look at ways to make the sport safer....but I'm sorry when you are hurling yourself down a water injected course at 85MPH wearing literally nothing except a speed suit and helmet...there is inherent risk that will not be eliminated.

Look knee injuries are just an unfortunate part of the sport given the design of a human knee and having a long board fixed to the leg which magnifies the rotational forces at the knee joint through leverage. As an extreme we can mandate skis be no longer than 40cms and the torsional risk reduces dramatically......but then brings in risk of instability when actualy skiing and frankly not a good solution. Or since injury severity increases with speed....we can mandate speeds be under 20mph and certainly will see a massive decrease in injury. We can also mandate that no races allowed unless you have 500m width of clearing of either side of the course (that would negate the need to use something like A netting which is designed to bounce the athlete back into the track and used in areas where this is preferred over athlete hitting what is on the other side). 4 rows of B-netting would easily catch any athlete going through. While we are at it, we can send the racer down in a giant airfilled bubble, sure mobility will be hampered but athlete can crash....more safely.....anywhere. Obviously some tounge in cheek....

Comparing impact to football is an apple and orange comaprison...in ski racing one isn't trying to crash and blow their knee. In football, you ARE trying to make contact with another player on every single play. Yes, ski injuries suck, the sport IS risky. However if you do a study on these injury incidences over the time spent on snow both on race day and training around the world at all age levels, you will quickly find the incidence risk is MUCH, MUCH smaller than you think. People seem to be fixated on speed, but frankly I've seen just as many season ending knee injuries in SL. On that note, what would you guess is the number of runs Lie has done for speed over her lifetime......now how times has she broke her leg?

Sometimes what you might think is logical just doesn't actually work, there are experts in the area that provide advise/imput to safety for a reason. This reminds me of my sport med. profs (prior life) teaching about their experience working with rodeo (bull riders). You'd think that wearing a helmet would be "safer" for the riders, but the data and force loads show that while it may provide some psychological impact to the rider, if they come crashing down head to head with the bull....the benefit of having the helmet was precisely ZERO. Or the risk of injury was no different if the rider competed with a broken arm or not.....i.e. the risk is so massive it doesn't matter if you are at 100% or broken.

I'm all for conversation, however when one suggests replacing the gates with a line, not allowing racers to touch gates, wearing shin protection in speed events, mandating protection where protection isn't needed (what one "feels" is not "data"), I am very curious if those suggestions are coming from somebody that actually races, has raced, and/or really understands the sport.
 
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dbostedo

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MOD NOTE: This thread has been created to pull a discussion out of the Women's World Cup thread, into its own, more appropriate thread. Please discuss here, and not in the prior thread.
 

ScotsSkier

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Yes, lets let the powers that be mandate more safety improvements. After all didn't they just do that a few years ago mandating 35m skis for GS ....and what a huge improvement in safety that was and look how many injuries it prevented.......oh wait, it didn't ....it actually significantly increased the number of back injuries......best intentions and all that??....and of course they then switched back to 30m.....but wait ....wasn't that what almost all the WC Skis actually were back in the >27m era.....so we got a lot more repetitive back injuries (Ted for example!) ....to get back to the same place......

Now, lets get back to reality. As someone who actually races regularly - and at a pretty advanced age (65+) so who does try to manage risk - rather than just watching it on TV, I can verify what the pros here who are actively coaching and working with racers have already pointed out. In 15 years of racing in all 4 disciplines and as one who for most of his race career has relied more on aggression and cutting off the line than skill :geek: (unless straight and late counts as a skill) i can testify that in literally thousands of runs in seeing any of my athletes GS, SG and DH courses I have yet to hit a gate with my shin!! Shoulders/arms/elbows hips and even head (yes, more frequently than i prefer to admit:() yes, but I have yet to hit a gate outside a slalom course with my shin. And as a coach I dont recall nay of my athletes trying to shin a GS gate.

And most certainly when running at anything above slalom speeds the last thing i want is the very real potential of shin guards getting entangled with each other (or even digging into the snow if I was able to get the angles some younger racers achieve) - especially if I am also busy trying to look down to make sure i am not crossing some arbitrary line in the snow rather than looking ahead... And, as has already been pointed out, slalom shin guards are used to stop bruising, not fractures...

Maybe we should swap our speed suits for Kevlar motor cycle leathers?
 

Bruno Schull

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@ScottsSkier--great perspective, thanks. Cool that you've lived, are living, the racing life. I agree that this is not about shin protectors doing anything in speed events--these are predominantly rotational lower leg fractures, not impact fractures, correct? I don't think shin guards would help at all.

I do think course design and surface finish and getting obstacles like gates out the way of falling skiers might help.

And I think the real gains could me made with skis, boots, bindings, and perhaps knee braces fitted with sensors of some kind--not the rigid exosleletons of today, the possible knee braces of tomorrow. The picture of the college football players wearing knee braces as a preventative measure are interesting.

But let's take a step backward, and look at the big picture. What are you really saying? Nothing can be done? Nothing should be done? It's all fine as it is?

With your experience in skiing and racing, how would you reduce the incidence of 21 year old skiers from breaking their tib/fib or rupturing their knee ligaments? That's the important question.

Last, to all those saying that these are unpreventable injuries because they fall at 70mph, similar to be tossed out of a moving car....sort of. Skiers fall steep slopes, and most energy is dissipated as they move downhill. We don't usually see catastrophic head injuries, multiple ruptured internal organs, and so on, the kind of injuries you see in car accidents. These are specific injuries, mostly related to those big levers (skis) on feet, and rotational forces on legs.

And I think these injuries can be mitigated with better design.
 

Primoz

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But let's take a step backward, and look at the big picture. What are you really saying? Nothing can be done? Nothing should be done? It's all fine as it is?
Realistically... yes. All is fine as it is. At least when considering broken bones injuries. Skiing is sport out in nature, where you can't control everything. Next to that, there's relatively high speed involved, and there's not much protection you can do, to avoid broken legs at such speed, unless they would put them in plastic bubble and roll them down the hill, but that's something that is called zorbing, if memory serves me right, not skiing.
But as I wrote, at least regarding broken bones injuries, there's really not that many. Sure there were 2 now in single race, and they did look horrible, even though I still think it's minor injury compared to blowing out all knee ligaments. But in general, there's not many such injuries. Back injuries is more common, but those are also not injuries you get in single run, and honestly I don't really see any way to prevent them. You are skiing down bumpy track at 100+kmh, which means you get millions of shocks in your body every single run you make. After run or two, nothing will show, after 15 years of such runs every day, your back will be in pretty bad shape.
Another thing are knee injuries. I'm sure there could be something done with some great science behind development of ski binding,but lets face it. Skiing is irrelevant sport and this also limits money involved in skiing and product development. So we have to live with what we have.
Regarding all crazy suggestions about limits, track painting, not hitting gates... There were very similar rules in past. They had balls attached to top of ski gates, and you got time penalty for each ball that fall of the gate (when you hit it) etc. Then life went forward, they invented plastic gates that bend etc. and we ended up with this what we have now. And honestly, I like this better then when they had 3cm thick wooden stick for gates.
 

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