Winter Olympics 2010: Safety fears as casualty list grows ahead of 'extreme games' - Telegraph

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By Ian Chadband Chief Sports Correspondent Published: 5:35PM GMT 09 Feb 2010

No fear: a snow boarder practises on the half-pipe Photo: Reuters

The motto of citius, altius, fortius – faster, higher, stronger – remains after 86years still perfectly intact for the Winter Olympics but an alternative, as theOlympic movement embraces the X Games, might just as easily be 'younger,scarier, riskier'.

Is edition XXI in Vancouver going to be the most dangerous Olympic editionthe world has yet seen? The horribly scarred build-up to the great ice andsnow show has provided no serious evidence to suggest otherwise.

For as the Games prepares to welcome new, evermore dramatic attractions, a catalogue of accidentsand serious injuries this winter has offered soberreminders of what can happen when would-beOlympians, emboldened by technological advancesin equipment, seek to push the boundaries of speedand complexity in their events to ever morehazardous levels.

The list of absent friends has shocked skiingofficials. It takes in numerous infirm alpine skiingluminaries, headed by Canada's world downhillchampion John Kucera, who snapped the tibia andfibula of his left leg when turning somersaults intothe safety fence at 65mph at Lake Louise, in

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Winter Olympics 2010: Safety fears as casualty list grows ahead of 'extreme games' - Telegraph

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The question over American half-pipe snowboarder Kevin Pearce remainswhether he will ever compete again as he makes tentative steps on the longroad to recovery from a brain injury suffered when failing to land an ambitiousjump during training.

Tragically, the same applies to Florent Astier, a French ski cross exponentwho crashed into a fellow racer last month and ended up requiring emergencysurgery after suffering a severe spinal cord injury and paralysis.

What has been so worrying for International Ski Federation (FIS) officials isnot so much the rate of injuries – astonishingly, the norm is that four out ofevery 10 alpine skiers, snowboarders and freestylers will lose some time toinjury during a season – but the frequency of season-ending or season-threatening accidents.

FIS has instituted a three-year scientific study and is interviewing 70 athletes,officials and ski equipment manufacturers to seek solutions, but it is no easytask when athletes are prepared to take that once-every-four-years risk tomake sure they get to the big show.

T J Lanning, a top American downhiller who shredded knee ligaments,fractured his neck and saw his Olympic dream broken at the same venue asKucera, is not alone in putting the trend down partly to new enhancedequipment and more water-injected, icier courses.

Not that the athletes complain. Most are, as Britain's top skier Chemmy Alcottputs it, "adrenalin junkies", which means the more precarious the challenge,the more they embrace it. So do Olympic officials, knowing that danger andspeed sells, particularly to the generation now being weaned on extreme sportin the televised Winter X Games.

Why else would the Whistler ice track, the swiftest and most challenging yetdesigned, be sanctioned? Why else would the half-pipe's walls be extended toallow more dangerous manoeuvres? Why else would some of the most recentadditions to the winter programme be short track speed skating, freestyleskiing and snowboarding, with their heightened risk factors?

Take the newcomer ski cross, long popular in the Winter X Games. Featuringfour racers careering down a slope, ski to ski over jumps and banks, it isdescribed exultantly by converted alpine skier Daron Rahlves as "a crossbetween motocross, NASCAR and bull riding. Intense, wild and a lot of out-of-control".

Its adherents say the terrible injury to Astier was a one-off, yet the perils areinescapable, just as they are on the half-pipe, where the ever-increasingdifficulty of jumps last month almost cost the Games the presence of their firstyouth icon, American Shaun White, who smashed his head against the wall lipat the X Games.

That he escaped with a minor injury seemed miraculous, but then theresilience of these men and women is almost taken for granted in an Olympicarena which has only been touched by tragedy three times; in 1964 inInnsbruck, Australian skier Ross Milne and British luger Kazimierz Kay-Skrzypeski died after training crashes, while in Albertville 1992, Swiss speedskier Nicholas Bochatay was also killed in practice for the demonstrationevent.

Yet the most symbolic sight in winter Olympic sport is probably still that ofHermann Maier, as the world held its breath after his terrible downhill crash inNagano in 1998, emerging from the snow like some indestructible yeti.

So the overriding hope for the daredevil, but not indestructible, class of 2010is that they too emerge unscathed from their most perilous Games.