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Reply to "The most dangerous Winter Olympic sports"

4. Course design also matters

Meeuwisse thinks that the course design, particularly in new sports, also makes a difference in the injury rate. For slopestyle, a newly-added sport in Sochi where athletes ski or snowboard down a course and perform tricks off jumps and obstacles along the way, “what we learned there is the course behaved very differently for the men and women because of the speeds that they’re going. And the landing zones therefore changed.”

This is a big deal. “To land safely from aerial sports, you want to be landing on the steepest part of the hill. Then it’s kind of a glancing landing – imagine where a ski jumper would land. Versus if you land on a flat surface, then there’s way, way more impact.”

Half of the women who competed in slopestyle ski at Sochi were injured, compared to 17 per cent of the men. The course, along with the weather, could be one reason why.

FM
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