Oh good, I get to do a helmet rant.
Every year the Love Ride is a charity motorcycle event on Los Angeles with thousands of participants.
Not one wearing a full face helmet. Interesting how your own personal safety is overridden by desperately wanting to fit in with the culture.
The helmet is a device that narrowly extends the brains ability to take damage. Easy to overwhelm that edge. The brain just won't tolerate high-G deceleration, and does nothing for rotational injuries. A couple of years ago a Le Mans car spun out and was sitting sideways on the track. His team mate hit him on the rear corner and spun him like a top. He suffered a broken jaw. There wasn't a mark on the helmet, it came from rotational force.
As far as Michael Schumacher, if you see film from the 70's, skiers sedately made their way down the slope with nothing more than a sharp turn or two.
Today, everyone watches YouTube and sees the aerial stunts and heads out to duplicate them.
Risk management doesn't exist for a huge number of skiers, snow boarders, off and on road motorcycles, skate boards, parkour . . .
Schumacher was skiing out of bounds on ungroomed snow. Makes sense for a risk-taker to want more than conventional slopes offer. But the risk goes up, and the risk was taken.
Sonny Bono, Natasha Richardson, even Sarah Burke, a four-time X Games superpipe gold medalist who was fatally injured two years ago while skiing in Park City, Utah.
“There’s a push toward faster, higher, pushing the limits being the norm, not the exception,” said Nina Winans, a sports medicine physician at Tahoe Forest MultiSpecialty Clinics in Truckee, Calif. “So, all of those factors — terrain parks, jumping cliffs and opening terrain that maybe wasn’t open in the past — play into some of these statistics with injuries.”
The population most susceptible to that culture is the one that is dying, statistics show. Seventy percent of snow-sports fatalities involve men in their late teens to late 30s, according to the ski area association. That is the same population that most often engages in high-risk behaviors like driving fast. Head injuries remain the leading cause of deaths in skiing and snowboarding, Shealy said, with about 30 in the United States each year.
New York Times article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/01/sports/on-slopes-rise-in-helmet-use-but-no-decline-in-brain-injuries.html?ref=sports&_r=0Take your dune buggy out? At Glamis dunes in California on busy weekends they position THREE ambulances there.
These injuries cost tens of thousands of dollars. Guess who gets to pay for all of the injuries?
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