Chalet 1802 - Chamonix-Mont-Blanc

Should you or should you not wear a ski helmet when skiing?

Dr Gerhard Ruedl from the Department of Sport Science at the University of Innsbruck says that there is evidence that ski helmets protect against head injury, and that one way to increase the use of helmets would be to make them included with ski hire. And, following some highly publicised deaths the issue has got a lot of press recently.

A recent study concluded that general head injury was reduced by 35% when helmets were worn, and this number increased to 59% for children under the age of 13.

Image via Wikipedia

But would wearing helmets actually make skiing safer? The issue needs to be looked a from the view point of how we, humans, deal with risk. Their are certain cases where changes are made, ostensibly, to make people safer, which in fact don’t.

With the advent of ABS braking – an innovation that greatly improves a cars breaking ability – you would expect to find that you would have safer drievrs. This wasn’t the case. Supplying drivers with ABS actually made them worse drivers: breaking harder, driving faster, tailgating other cars more often. So the introduction of ABS didn’t reduce the rate of accidents. So what happened? Drivers were consuming the extra risk reduction, they could now drive faster and more dangerously for the same risk as before. This type of risk homeostasis doesn’t happen all the time, but it does happen often enugh that it should be consideerd.

So where does this fit in with ski helmets? Ski helmets may provide a fasle sense of security, resulting in faster skiing and riskier behaviour which in itself could lead to more accidents.

Overall the authors believed that the evidence points to helmets having a protective effect and that we should increase the use of helmets. But then that’s what they thought about ABS. Food for thought…

Related articles

• Helmets reduced ski injuries (lv.com)
• Ski helmet use ‘makes sense’ (bbc.co.uk)
• Ski helmets have a lesson for us … on ‘localism’ (boris-johnson.com)

You’ve just got back from your ski holiday. You’ve got another year to wait until your next trip. Depression begins to set in.

The time for worry has past. With an Alpinesofa you can have the thrill and joy of skiing whilst sitting at home watching Eastenders.

What are you wating for?

This week members of the International Olympic Committee are visiting the proposed sites of the Annecy Winter Olympics 2018.

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Chamonix is the proposed site of the ice hockey, and in Les Houches we’d have all the alpine skiing events. It would be a major boon for the area, and voting takes place in Durban on July 6th.

Unfortunately the French bid has been plagued with internicine warfare recently, but the South Koreans have come pretty close to actual warfare so it looks like it could be between Annecy and Munich. (Do they actually have mountains in Germany?).

Related articles

• Annecy delivers official bid documents to host 2018 Games (thestar.com)
• French 2018 Olympic bid chief quits (theglobeandmail.com)
• Annecy 2018 bid will fight on, says French IOC member (reuters.com)

With the recent lack of snow in the alps what better to do than hit the park? Luckily Les Houches has a belter this year thanks to the DC boys. Certainly worth checking out.