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Are the Olympics seeing more injuries thanks to the rise of new, more extreme sports?
The Sochi Olympics have seen numerous severe injuries, especially in ski cross, where Russian skier Maria Komissarova broke her back during training and required two extensive surgeries. Three further competitors crashed Friday, including Canada's Georgia Simmerling. It's not just ski cross that's resulting in trips to the hospital, though; snowboardcross, ski and snowboard halfpipe runs and ski and snowboard slopestyle competitions have also seen serious injuries mount up. CBC's Amber Hildebrant talked to some knowledgeable people who suggested that the extreme nature of many of these newer sports may be a factor in the injuries we're seeing:
The 2014 Winter Games have been marked by numerous injuries, putting the spotlight on the dozen medal events introduced at these Olympics to attract a younger audience.
“I think we’re going to see more and more [injuries] as the games seem to be moving more … toward the next model,” said Janice Forsyth, director of the Western University’s International Centre for Olympic Studies, “because they’re borrowing more sports from the extreme sports model, like from Red Bull Crashed Ice and the X Games.”
Hildebrant writes that Sochi doesn't seem higher in terms of overall numbers, but it has seen more injuries in the extreme sports:
A research group inside the IOC’s medical commission is watching athlete injuries closely to tally them up and compare them to past Games, including Beijing in 2008, Vancouver in 2010 and London in 2012.
Though their official findings won’t be known until early April, but the head of Sochi’s medical research team, Lars Engebretsen, says at this stage it looks like the overall number is no different than in previous Games.
But Engebretsen notes that the new sports – slopestyle, freestyle and snowboard cross – show an increase in knee injuries.
At the last Winter Games in Vancouver, more than one out of 10 athletes were injured during the games, and seven per cent came down with an illness.
Competitions with the highest rates of injuries were bobsleigh, ice hockey, short track, alpine, freestyle and snowboard cross – where the rate ranged from 15 to 35 per cent of participants.
Not all of those sports are new, of course. Ice hockey has been in the Olympics since 1920, bobsleigh has been there since 1924 (except for 1960), and alpine skiing has been contested in every Olympics from 1936 on. Those sports also see some of the most severe injuries, such as the torn MCL and meniscus Canadian hockey player John Tavares suffered in Friday's semifinal that's going to end his NHL season. Still, there are a lot of notable injuries in short track speedskating, the various freestyle skiing events and the various snowboarding events. Many of the freestyle skiing and snowboarding events certainly fall into that X Games-popularized category. (It's notable that a lot of the injuries in those events have been suffered by women, too, and that they tend to compete on the same courses as men; that brings up its own set of safety discussions.) The courses for those events in Sochi have raised plenty of concerns as well, as Bloomberg's Chris Spillane explored this week:
The final of the snowboard cross, also known as boardercross, was postponed by a day because of dense fog on the hill, but the murky conditions returned during the event’s latter stages while freezing rain made the snow slushy and exposed ice. The injury toll at the Winter Games is rising as bad weather and risk-taking by athletes combine to provide an element of danger that fans crave, yet has some competitors being carried off on stretchers. ...
Among the casualties was Canada’s Kevin Hill, 27, who ended up with his face bloodied and his ski goggles broken into four pieces after a fall. Such was the amount of rain on the course it reminded him of water sports.
“Because of the wet conditions, there’s a lot of slush, and underneath the slush there’s ice, and I hit my face on the ice,” Hill said in an interview. “I wouldn’t mind if I was swimming when I was racing, as long as I get to the bottom. I’m happy to be safe and happy to be going home healthy.”
We'll see if there are any attempts to try and make these sports safer at future Olympics. Perhaps the qualifying standards will be tightened, or perhaps the courses will be built a little easier at future Games. There's no discussion of trying to take these sports out, though, and that's good news for Canada. Freestyle skiing and snowboarding events have been crucial to the Canadian medal count, with 11 of the 24 medals in Sochi thus far coming in those sports. Thus, despite their perils, they're something the Canadian Olympic team definitely wants to keep around.
