This is really interesting to me, my father thought me to spell assume (one of the few I can spell) but after defecting to the snowboarding world I went back to skiing because the crashes seemed less violent. It seems like if you catch the downhill edge on a snowboard you can be tossed hard enough to cause serious head trauma. Could it be from the pure physics of skiers going faster? or maybe hitting a tree on a snowboard has a chance of being a glancing blow vs. a straddled crash. There may be a lot more skiers still but it seems like the people in the highest risk bracket, young people, all seem to be snowboarding these days. Also does anyone have numbers of how many people skied last year, it would be interesting to compare the risks to other activities like driving.
|Originally posted by Greg D:
</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by funkybob:
ski press reported 31 dead skiers and 6 dead snow boarders last season, but the odd part is, 31 men died and 6 women died. coincidence?
also I would have thought that more snowboarders would have died(or should have) but perhaps that is proof that there are still more skiers.
</font>[/quote]Ok so being bored and trying to save money I did some research and answered a few of my own questions. It appears that skiing is very safe compared to a lot of life activities. Over the past 10 years there has been an average of 38 skiing deaths each year with an average visitation of 54.2 million visits a year. So the chances of dieing is well below 1 in a million visits so you are more likely to die driving to the mountain then actually skiing. Here are some statistics from: http://www.washtimes.com/sports/2003...2457-8752r.htm
In 2001, skiing's 45 fatalities worked out to 4.21 deaths for every 1 million skiers. For scuba diving in 2000, there were 91 fatalities, 56.9 for every million divers; in swimming (2001) there were 1,200 fatalities, 21.9 per million swimmers; and bicycling had 800 fatalities in 2001, for a rate of 20.5 for every million cyclists
So although the deaths are tragic and we should put lots of effort into reducing the numbers I would say that we are actually participating in a fairly safe sport.