Sledding athletes are taking their lives | Hacker News Reader

Sledding athletes are taking their lives

nytimes.com

201 pointsmhb227 comments

> On Feb. 22, 2013, Morris attached an accelerometer to his helmet, then launched his body down a 1,500-meter track at the sliding center in Whistler, British Columbia, which is considered the fastest track in the world and was a venue for the 2010 Winter Olympics.

Bobsleigh has been a feature of the Winter Olympics since 1924 [1]. Yet it might have taken until 2013 for someone to measure its g force on its athletes' heads.

One would think that when something is developed to the point of an international sport, it's certainly been measured. Been tested. But the disturbing or revealing or inspiring truth is, most of our normality has not been scientifically considered.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobsleigh_at_the_Winter_Olympi...

> it might have taken until 2013 for someone to measure its g force

To be fair, measuring this sort of thing was pretty hard in the past, when cheap miniaturized sensors and memory didn't exist.

I expect we will see more and more activities being re-evaluated now that tech is easily wearable.

Could you do it photographically? If you can photograph the head movements at a high enough frame rate, you should be able to calculate the acceleration that produced those movements.

When you are looking for something like 80g (as is the maximum of the graph), then the head would move something like 4 cm between two frames, which suggests to me, that you probably want to have a lot more than 100 fps, since you want to get a good handle on the highest accelerations.

On the other end of the scale, the positional error from the camera sensor is something like

  width of frame / horizontal resolution

which should give you something in the mm range, and it seems possible to get head tracking in the same order of resolution, which should limit your acceleration measurement for low acceleration.

Overall, probably doable but you are replacing a 30c accelerometer with a multi year research project.

It's about pressure and load, not movement. Also the sleds vibrate and shake enormously. Any method of measuring this has to be extremely precise, and also extremely responsive to changes over extremely short time frames to capture every vibration and shake in many different axes of freedom simultaneously. Before modern motion sensors I just don't think there was any way to do it.

Even if motion was enough, which I'm sure it isn't, film only captures a flat image from a fixed point, or the camera is moving itself so you have to compensate for that. Springs and wires suggested by others have way too much hysteresis to cope with the extremely rapid vibrations and changes in orientation.

You could do it with a weight on a spring, and a little pen attached to the weight.

That won’t handle the number of degrees of freedom a bobsled uses.

True. How about suspending a little metal bullet in a gel, chosen such that the bullet will break through the gel if the G-force is more than a certain threshold. This will give a good indication if the forces are within an acceptable range.

This kid of stuff is incredibly hard to use for accurate results. Gels (and all materials) are not perfect in any sense, and you'd need significant effort modeling any material you used - viscosity under all sorts of motions (since nothing is nicely linear), the gel itself is sloshing, compressing, has different lag times...

It's possible in theory, but in practice would not be useful.

Look at what planes (Air Force has lots of R&D) did for the past century to see the state of the art at each point and the methods used.

Reminds me of shockwatch for packages.

Just thinking this through, wouldn't three weights on springs get you all the data? Or some sort of membrane containing a liquid than ruptures when a particular amount of force is felt in any direction?

Peak is not enough - you need to know time impulse. A 10G accel over 1 sec has much different effect than a 10G over a nanosecond.

And the measuring devices must also handle this nuance. A liquid has inertia, so won't register quick impulses, and the things it measures might not be relevant to what bio systems are interested in.

The problem with three axes is that the registration of the largest deviation by the pen happens for the axes independently.

Yet its still valid data in that its trivial to calculate the theoretical maximum peak accel based on the possibly independent peak accels of the individual axes.

If in theory the max peak acceleration could never exceed 2 G then there's no point in continuing the study. If the theoretical max peak accel could be 57 G then there's a point in continuing the study.

The whole problem is irrelevant anyway. The problem isn't one individual sled journey, the problem is thousands of competitors taking thousands of rides over many years, so "tens of millions". They are competitive with each other having small std deviations in performance so each sled ride is roughly the same. Tiny reliable cameras have been a thing for a century as have mechanical timers. Simply bolt a half pound telemetry package to every sled that snaps a single random point of data via camera or some weird linkage to clutches and springs. Then run a data analysis and make statistical predictions. You wouldn't even need a 1960s mainframe to run the statistical analysis. This would have been something near BAU for mid-century aeronautical engineers, for example. I'm sure something similar was implemented during the test program for the F-86 or maybe P-51.

The other thing is that with many sports there were massive "improvements" in tech, especially regarding speed, meaning that what was a "safe" sport until maybe 50-60 years ago is now putting human bodies to and over limits they have not yet evolved to endure.

And to top it all off, doping has also gone off the rails with no one having any idea about the long-term effects of the stuff athletes are taking - especially regarding cross effects between medications, shoddy manufacturing leading to contaminations and other such issues.

Except measuring G-forces acting on a helmet doesn't directly relate to the forces acting on the head within it.

Why not? To me (a layperson in the physics of helmets and brains), they would seem to be quite directly related, especially when the cause of the gees is not related to an impact.

The helmet is a light mass, which can move relative to the head, and experience drastically higher g-forces for very short times. Sampling an accelerometer at kHz rates as a helmet is vibrating (without translating all of the vibrational energy into the head), will measure larger peak G's than the head experiences.

For this reason, when studying head impact for football players, they mount the accelerometers in the mouth guard. This more accurately reflects the real g-forces, as the teeth (ideally) don't move much relative to the brain during an impact, and have the appropriate reference frame.

The differences can be extremely large. The peaks reflected in this graph are absolutely not real and should not be taken literally.

Yes, but notice that the shock goes sled -> spine -> head -> helmet in sledding and other player -> helmet -> head in football. So, strapping an accelerometer onto the helmet looks quite a bit better for sledding. (And especially for a first measurement.)

Yep, except in the cases where the head hits the sled or ice, as mentioned in the article. I suspect these are responsible for large (and artifactual from the perspective of the brain) transient spikes in measured G-forces

What would you say is the maximum frequency that the helmet is coupled to the head at? Filtering is a trivial operation and I would expect the g forces felt by sledders to be sustained for the better part of a second. You lose a lot of fidelity, but if you’re still over the line then you know there’s a problem.

According to the article, the tracks are designed for sustained g-forces of 5Gs. These are the accelerations that are sustained for greater than a second. According to the annotations on the NYT's plot, the g forces which are most alarming are from when the helmet makes contact with the ice. This is precisely when the helmet accelerations would be expected to differ wildly from what the head is actually doing.

A low pass filter could easily be used to remove the impacts with the ice, but minus the impacts with the ice there's nothing in that acceleration trace that should be alarming for a professional athlete. The high frequency content is the concern here.

Helmets are padded, deform, or have suspension systems to decelerate any impulse that the helmet takes. This should cause a very different g-force spike between what the shell of the helmet experiences, and what the wearer experiences.

If the helmet didn't decelerate any impulse to the head, the range of impacts that it could theoretically protect the wearer from would actually be quite narrow.

> If the helmet didn't decelerate any impulse to the head, the range of impacts that it could theoretically protect the wearer from would actually be quite narrow.

This is wonderful understatement: “If the g-forces between the helmet and the brain weren’t different, the helmet wasn’t a helmet at all!”

A helmet without padding can protect against low energy penetrating impacts; think BBs or similar. They do this by spreading the impact point out over the entire head; preventing penetration or fracture.

But for pure G forces, you’re right. A helmet with no padding is effectively similar to not having a helmet at all.

A helmet can just protect the skull So a helmet doesn't have to be padded or help with g-forces to be a helmet. I think helmets were initially just to prevent skull fracture.

well, yeah when those helmets were worn by knights in the middle ages, but many helmets nowadays have to withstand g-forces to do their job.

If English was like Italian there might be a specific word for a non g-force withstanding helmet and otherwise.

Knight's helmets were actually heavily padded, with most knights wearing heavy padded linen garments over their torso, arms, and head. Nicer helmets would have a leather strap system as well. Many helmets appeared to have integral liners, although the linen has rotted away and only left the rivets where they were attached.

With the advent of plate armor, offensive techniques began to focus on concussive force in order to disable combatants, including war hammers and maces. A blow to the head with only a bit of steel between your skull and a mace would be a fatal experience without any padding. Even with padding it was notorious for deafening and disorienting knights, due to noise and (presumably) brain injury.

It's a lucky thing that Sir Ulrich Von Liechtenstein was such a cunning champion in both the sword and joust or he might have ended up with all the brains of poor Wat.

And every war in the first half of the 20th century.

The helmet is padded.

Your head is in a suspension within the helmet, much like your brain is in a suspension within the skull.

Your skull can accelerate at extremely high G's without harming the brain as long as it stays well within the modulus of the suspension. i.e. not for too long. The helmet adds another suspension on top of this.

You are confusing the ability to sustain the g-force by the brain with the force experienced. A padding on the helmet helps in event of collision, not the g-force which is due to the acceleration

Sure the helmet helps with g-forces. Say you're going down the track and enter a tight turn. The helmet contacts the side of the sled at say 5 g's because the helmet is hard and so is the side of the sled. The brain impacts the helmet, which impacts the side of the sled, but the padding in the helmet spreads that impact over a greater period of time, since the padding compresses, so the brain only experiences a g-force of 2.

How is a collision not just another acceleration?

In a collision, the helmet gets hit and, subject to some degree of padding and such, transfers the impact to the head. If you’re sitting in a sled and the sled accelerated rapidly, your head and your helmet must accelerate with it, although you may not perfectly track its path. Unless the helmet is also secured to your torso, all the forces on the helmet come from your head. You would need tremendous acceleration of your head to meaningfully deform any but the softest padding.

The whole point of a helmet is to absorb impacts. It's designed to dampen rapid accelerations so your head doesn't have to.

Are you perhaps confusing impact with g-force? A good analogy would be a fighter pilot or an astronaut. The g-force is felt all over the body irrespective of whether you are wearing a suit or not.

The g-force spikes in the graph are due to impacts. It even says that on the graph.

It doesn't matter. You don't have to measure something perfectly and exactly to decide if it's an avenue of research worth exploring. If turns are designed to limit G-forces to 5G, and you put sensors on your helmet and they're reading 55G when your head hits the ice, that's probably an indication that further research is required.

You could have >55G when you stay in your room and bump your head against the wall

Yes, but you don't do that over and over again every day. Unless you like practicing bumping your head against a wall, but it's not a sport I've ever heard of.

ok - You have a point. Researching this area is worth it. Can you see that the others also have a point? That is, measuring helmet g-forces is a proxy to find head g-forces but they are not one and the same?

However, the real issue is not g-forces on _corners_ it is the g-forces on _head/helmet hitting the ice_ where 5 g from the first are rounding errors compared to 55g from the second.

"measuring helmet g-forces is a proxy to find head g-forces but they are not one and the same"

I don't think I said they were, just that it's a worthwhile thing to measure to see if you should start finding a way to get better measurements. I agree they are not the same and this is not a definitive study. This is often how science works, you do something quick and easy. If it came out that it was only ever minor forces on the outside of the helmet, it's probably not worth investigating since the forces inside the helmet will be even less. If they're huge, repeated forces, it's probably worth trying to come up with a better rig to measure actual force and see if it's above a healthy level.

Do you think there's a material inside the helmet that can stop gravity?

I once went on a bobsled ride on an old Olympic track. 4-person bobsled, two professionals controlling the sled, two passengers. I think we didn't go into the final turn properly, and the sled rode high and the brakeman (rear) hit his helmet on the side of the track. He was a bit dizzy afterwards, but otherwise it wasn't treated as a big deal. If this kind of thing just happens on relaxed tourist runs, I can only imagine what's normalized in training and competition.

Bobsledding isn't as popular as the majority of "international sports", putting it into that category doesn't justify its strong examination. I'm not surprised personally, it's a niche sport without human-on-human violent contact; something like American football is more perceptibly dangerous than some of these rare Olympic sports.

That bobsleigh track was designed specifically to be faster than any other. They had to close part of it for the actual Olympics because someone died in training right before hand. They went for records instead of safety.

TBI seem to have huge consequences that are not connected to the TBI.

In the US 2% of the general population is arrested annually. Of those who have had TBI roughly third. A similar one-third rate was found in a community sample of children and adolescents with TBI. In death row inmates it's even more common to have received TBI in childhood.

https://www.brainline.org/article/traumatic-brain-injury-pri...

https://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/21/arts/damaged-brains-and-t...

Wow. I wonder if we look back at this in 50 years the same way that we look at the impact of leaded gasoline on behavior.

Among the many other ways our system amplifies recidivism, it's horrifying how common it is for police and prison guards to strike people in the head during confrontations.

could that be the other way around? If you're more rowdy, you're more likely to have had a traumatic brain injury?

They are almost certainly a vicious cycle of TBI increasing the chance for TBI-related* behaviors in the future. (*either getting or receiving).

This seems totally unacceptable. We should stop having this sport in the Olympics (implicitly supporting this madness) -- of course athletes are free to do as they chose, but we cannot encourage such pointless self-destruction and misery.

An alternative to save the sport is completely redesign it to limit maximum accelerations. Usually injuries follow power laws so I doubt even that much reduction would be necessary (shed maximum accel to 1/3 current and I bet lifetime injuries could become acceptable). Mandatory equipment changes would probably help as well.

I think the Olympics is just generally physically bad for the athletes. Runners, weightlifters, wrestlers, boxers, rowers, etc all these folks end up working so close o the edge of sustainable human tolerance and capacity that’s it’s unlikely they are not constantly going over it.

I find it extremely weird when people complain that athletes should stop their sport because "it's bad for them". So is office work. 8 hours of sitting, back pain and the repetitive stress on hands causing arthritis issues isn't that much better. I'd say it's just as physically bad for people, except office work is a life unfulfilled and boring. Office work isn't exactly something you can brag about. I'd rather have bad knees being a competitive runner than having bad knees because I sit too much.

There's inherent risk in simply living. If people want to have fulfilled lives by pushing their body's to the limit, that's their choice and to be honest, a choice we should all be encouraged to try in our lives to some capacity. Also, to pretend they're unaware of the risk is ridiculous. It's not like the Olympics is the only competitive arena for these disciplines.

Pointing out how it damages body should be as acceptable as pointing out too much sugar is bad for you. There is absolutely nothing weird about saying so. And also, office work is less damaging to body then top sport.

Second, general public knowing that top sport damages body influences parents, teachers and coaches decisions. When we make that topic taboo, people are more likely to push kids toward maximum performance in sport. To teach them set of values that pushes it.

When we know serious clubs can damage them, we are more likely to pick less serious clubs (which prevents future top engagement).

> [office chair back pain, finger injuries] isn't that much better

But this generally doesn't case suicide

And can be treated, by going to the gym. (I had back, knee, elbow pain myself, from office work — and the gym, made it disappear. In my particular case)

> bad knees

Agreed, I'd be ok with bad knees.

But when it's the brain, it's ... to some extent, the end.

That's true, but I don't think GP was referring to those special cases where the risk is to the brain, even though those are the what the linked article of course discusses.

As their parent comment said, any sport that compels you to reach for the extremes of physical human performance carries a risk of injury and wear that's obviously greater than just exercising for health and casual fitness. In most cases that's to something else in your body than your brain.

But that reaching for the limits is also what makes those sports enjoyable to some people, and nothing else might quite equal the experience.

Agreed, we should not sympathize on behalf of them where they're free to choose to do something else if they wanted. This is a concious choice and it is in the same vein as people would support legalization of recreational drugs - let people make their own decisions.

Wanna rock climb and take the risk? We should allow it just like we allow sky diving, climbing the Everest and sailing.

This kind of thinking leads to degradation of the society where no one will be allowed to take risks.

> Wanna rock climb and take the risk? We should allow it

That's different from broadcasting a free soloing climbing tournament across the world, and giving rewards to the winners (survivors)

"Allowing" need not meen "encouraging"

So, ban all competitions in general? That sounds like a fantastic idea... gonna solve lots of problems with that one.

Football, both kinds, have lots of permanent injuries throughout the body and brain. If you want to talk about rewarding people for pushing themselves to the extreme, those are far better examples than free soloing.

It's interesting when people are fine with stopping passion sports like climbing, skateboarding and now sledding, but they're too scared to say the same about the 800-pound guerrilla, money making machine sports with a lot more TBIs and deaths. Especially since a lot of people go for football more for the reward than for the actual passion.

Again, it's not like anyone participating in any of these sports are unaware of the risk. An argument might exist for 20-30 years ago. But not today. That takes flat-earther mental gymnastics to think they aren't putting themselves at risk. But at the end, if you're complaining that, "These people push their body's too far", that's not you caring about their well being. That's you seeing your own weakness, laziness and cowardliness to attempt the same feat. These folks are going to push themselves some way, some how, because they want to not die wondering "what if". No one is ever safe from "mental demons" and it's terrible when someone takes their own life, no matter what the category root cause was. But I know very well that choosing to achieve nothing due to fear is a bigger open door for those issues.

> So, ban all competitions

I wrote "not encouraging", that's different from "ban all". Why did you reply to "ban all" instead?

I like MMA and UFC, however, the fighters get brain scanned to find out about underlying problems, and if you get knocked out, you cannot compete again for a long while (because of TBI risk).

Whilst the sledding sports seem to ignore brain injuries.

Fair enough, that's an important distinction and I concede. I think it makes sense to prevent glorifying deadly sports and still allow them to be conducted.

Isn't that the whole point of the Olympics though? To push humans to the limit.

Nit: To have humans push themselves to the limit.

With things like running, rowing, and weightlifting you aren't at a significant risk of brain injury though. I would much rather have damaged joints than a damaged brain. And for these sledding athletes, it sounds like this damage is constant and inevitable even if you do everything perfectly, rather than a result of accidents like with sports like snowboarding and skiing.

Weight cutting is pretty bad for your body, and they take it to extreme levels of drying out their bodies too, so any of these sports which have weight classes (all the weight lifting, wrestling) are pretty damaging to all organs in the body and have caused death before. Not advocating to stop these in Olympics, pointing out there's non-obvious risks athletes take beside head trauma.

Injury risk can be counterintuitive, like how synchronized swimmers pretty much universally suffer from concussions [0]

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetorch/2016/08/16/490074935/t...

I don't understand this comment; what is physically bad about running? I'll accept that you may have a higher rate of injuries but surely we can agree that pulling a muscle and giving yourself Parkinson's are not remotely in the same ballpark of injuries.

Knee implants, significant negative hormonal changes for men over 50 miles/wk. Repetitive stress injuries are no joke.

OP is probably not aware that the Olympics does not have ultra-marathon type events which are generally very unhealthy for participants, only a 10K and a marathon (and shorter sprints of course)

WRT knee damage, I found a Harvard report saying that running helps protect your knees against arthritis [0]. You'll have to source your own hormonal claim because it was too vague for me to find much, but what I did find did not seem negative [1][2].

[0] https://www.health.harvard.edu/healthbeat/will-continuing-to...

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19046725/

[2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18208421/

That first link is just a Q/A. There is no study or report linked.

Almost all studies use untrained vs trained athletes. They rarely qualified what "trained" means and could be anything from a lifetime athlete to someone who self-reported following a 6 week plan prior to the study and now we consider this person "trained". Most athletic studies are used to compare a sedentary person to someone who workouts casually (less than about 10 hours per week). Once you pass this point, you're in diminishing returns territory and you've got to actively sacrifice some parts of your overall health to make gains in a single activity (sprinting, jumping, etc.).

So will running a few times a week help fight mild arthritis? Probably. Will training like an Olympic athlete? No. Same thing applies to the OP article. Will sledding down a hill give you brain damage? No. Will constantly sledding at Olympic athlete speeds and g-forces? Seems like it.

Yeah, you definitely have to sacrifice parts of your overall health if you want to exercise more than 90 minutes per day.

Diminishing returns doesn't mean that you have to sacrifice anything (besides some idealized notion of efficiency). The hurt-your-overall-health point is somewhere much closer to Olympic athlete than it is to 10hrs/week. If you just vary the activities a little, you will have no trouble with spending a lot more time on exercise. People who literally do only the one physical activity they compete in are straw men.

PS: The number of people completely clueless about fitness on HN would be hilarious if it weren't so sad.

Working out (not including warmup/cooldown) for 90 min, 7 days per week is insane and you will be less healthy. No rest day means you'll be over trained in less than two weeks, and your workouts will get worse over time. Not only that you'll probably get injured within a month.

Let's say you create a sane schedule of 3 days on, 1 day off (or similar) and you workout 2 hours per day (20 hours in 2 weeks) and let's assume you're sleeping the necessary 10 hours per day for this training schedule. And we'll make the very generous assumption you manage to not get injured for an extended period of time. You're still at higher risk of infections due to suppressed immune system[1] and also at a certain FFMI, your cardiovascular health actually starts to decrease[2]. Plus the chances that your nutrition, mobility, sleep schedule, and training plan are all good enough to not get you injured or sick during training, are astronomically low.

I only workout 60-75 minutes 5 days/week and I'm already at or above the FFMI level where my heart health is worse than if I just stuck to moderate intensity exercise for less time.

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19336500/ [2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00256...

Huh, seems I read "workout" as "generic exercise" in your previous post, but I guess you meant high intensity stuff exclusively. I'm pretty sure most athletes have stuff to do that doesn't really have this sort of limit -- like cardio or technical work.

Runners experience the same immune suppression effects as people who train HIIT: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8164529/

Interesting.

The thinking behind my post was that if you add up training (for the activity they compete in) and all the other physical activities people do, the differences in training volume will be dominated by the other differences -- consider people with jobs that involve manual labor, or, to a lesser extent, bike commuters. Perhaps this was controlled for in the studies?

The other thing I had in mind was people whose sports involve lots of different movements one can practice -- say, ice hockey. I have no idea whether ice hockey shooting practice counts as high intensity... but it's not nothing, and doesn't seem much like ultra running either.

How do you know all that? There is no scientific consensus that exercising over 10 ours per week sacrifices your overall health.

You're talking about regular running, not trying to literally be the best runner in the world. Completely different.

> Knee implants

Source? I would expect these are much more common in obese people than in habitual runners. My understanding is that runners have been found to have healthy knees, e.g. with a bit of googling I find [1][2] (but haven't read them).

> significant negative hormonal changes for men over 50 miles/wk

They have found somewhat lower testosterone levels, but I don't know of any study finding negative health impacts. Do you have a source for "significant negative"?

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5179322/ [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2556152/

Not to the degree that there is a pattern of them committing suicide before 50. This sport seems particularly pernicious because it's a slow accumulated brain injury and because the sport normalises concussion which is taken very seriously in other sports.

It would not be the first Olympic sport redesigned for safety concerns.

The first one that I am aware of is Javelin. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Javelin_throw#Javelin_redesign... for more.

That case though was about safety of the audience, says the article.

True, but nevertheless it shows that it can be done.

Formula 1 and motor racing in general is a prime example for that as well. Formula 1 has a strict set of rules that makes sure the speed and cornering speeds aren't going through the roof because of deadly accidents in the past.

The same could be done for sledding. Reduce speed by limiting what is technically allowed and improve protection of the athletes. From reading the article i could imagine that a headrest with a dampening foam is added to the sledge and prevent the helmet from touching the ice. Or add role bars to the sledge that protects the athletes from injuries during a crash. Or a emergency brake that stops the sledge from sliding all the way to the end after a crash. There are many more things that i can imagine. If it all makes sense has to be evaluated. But first the political will to change something has to be there. And i think that's the difference between formula 1 and sledding. In one sport there was instant death of the athletes and in the other the athletes deteriorated over time.

Instead of or in addition to all that, wouldn't you just make the course less steep?

Sure that would work as well. But i imagine that to be much more expensive then adding some requirements to the sledge that increases drag or increases the sliding friction

There are many instances of redesign due to safety concerns. The clean and press was removed from weightlifting because it was very bad for the back. Some judo throws (such as ones that twisted the knee) where also removed for safety reasons.

>pointless self-destruction and misery.

Maybe its pointless for you, fair enough but it can be meaningfull for other people, i myself think it's interesting.

Well said.

Depending on people's level of courage, or lackthereof, all sports might seem like pointless self-destruction and misery. Heck, even basketball or ice curling.

Heck, I would never in my right-mind try grinding a rail on a skateboard after seeing some kid break his leg on a bad landing.

But just cause it looks insane to me doesn't mean it has no value or merit.

Not to mention that it makes a fun video game on the PS2.

I recommend the YouTube rabbit hole of Alex Honnold interviews, whenever he talks about risk it's interesting.

honnold may be a special case. his capabilities of dealing with risk and fear are exceptional.

He has a unique perspective, I've heard on a couple occasions him talking about his father dropping dead of a heart attack changing planes. I can't find the exact video or I'd link it, but he's clearly thought a lot about risk and is pretty interesting to listen to even if you're not enamored with his exploits.

I'd say it's partly that, but more a case of survivorship bias; we don't hear from other solo free climbers because most of them are dead.

citation needed

Edit: It's not like these climbers never climb with gear. That is, they don't have to confront the learning curve and fatal consequences at the same time. They can also learn safely via bouldering, climbing above water and such.

Yes, that's sort of why I recommended his interviews, because he's given it a lot of thought and has interesting things to say about risk (I imagine even if he initially didn't think a ton about it, people constantly asking has given him some good answers) in addition to the explanation that these climbs are prepared for in advance.

Why is he a special case. There are hundreds if not 1000s of people that want to be risk takers for no other reason then the risk its self

You're right. Just visit GoPros youtube channel. There's no shortage of adrenaline seekers.

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/one-mans...

>Many have poured scorn on Curry’s venture, particularly since it doesn’t have a charitable component. “This is the most pathetic waste of man hours that could have been used for good that I’ve seen in a long time,” one typical YouTube comment says. On the forum where he first heard about Dick Tree’s idea, Curry posted a spirited, if nihilistic, rebuttal. “To say that our lives are pointless and our achievements meaningless is to state the obvious,” he wrote. “No matter how grand our achievements or how broad their scope, time turns all to dust and death destroys all memory. But that does not mean we cannot ascribe our own meaning to what we do.”

This argument was had when Jackie Stewart campaigned to make Formula 1 safe. Fortunately he prevailed, but there were plenty of people - even other drivers - arguing that the danger was an intrinsic part of the sport.

Just look how much safer racing has become since it's inception. And also at the same time, the sport has become magnitudes faster. There's no reason we can't have faster, more exciting, and safer all at the same time. It's just another challenge to the sport.

matz should not be downvoted. Humans do lots of objectively pointless self-destruction like things as a hobby with increasing risks. Things like human powered flight, aerogliding and sky diving, parkour, climbing steep things with and without gear, driving at high speeds around bends, 'explore' the wild, many of which we celebrate, reward and encourage.

If it were meaningful for the athletes, they would not be taking their own lives after clearly struggling in complete misery for years; clearly even endangering lives of loved ones. You can tell most just don't understand what they signed up for.

In any case, we're rewarding and glorifying this activity. It's not just there, of course people are free to do as they please. We're making them go through this sacrifice (that clearly leaves great damage) for a reward of glory, fame or just money. If you give gold medals for it, no matter how pointless, unfulfilling and destructive it is, someone will do it. It's our responsibility.

When there are really beautiful sports out there, that players really clearly enjoy, and which are reasonably healthy (of course to an extent every activity has risks), there's simply no excuse.

When the sport is on Olympic and we encourage people to push themselves to maximum or encourage kids to pick it up, then it is not anymore about individual feeling from risk.

It is risk taken to earn.

But that's no reason to make it an Olympic sport, thus encouraging people to take more risks.

So funny thing about unacceptable and lateral g-force — this is a big part of why F1 cars aren’t V10 engines anymore. They were getting too fast and the decision was between g-suits and slower cars. FIA chose slower cars (also more fuel efficient, yay).

Now it’s a few years later and cars have again advanced to the point that drivers pull more than 5 lateral G in some corners. It’s kinda bonkers.

I wonder if something like the HANS device could be useful in sledding. Or those neck protectors motocross riders use. Might keep heads from banging around as much.

Do you have a source on the reason for moving away from V10s being about safety of drivers. It was, I thought, about cost reduction and image (move towards less gas guzzling monsters and then hybrid that we have today)

https://web.archive.org/web/20070428004836/http://www.formul...

"For 2006, engines are reduced in size from the previous 3-litre V10s to 2.4-litre V8s. The aim is to reduce costs and improve safety."

You can also tell that it's mostly about performance, given all the other design restrictions (no variable valve timing, no intercoolers, just one spark plug, etc ).

And to think that the sport that actually did Schumacher in was skiing - something millions of people do casually every weekend.

My point is that while there has to be a thrust on safety, even the mundane can be unsafe enough; you can't overstress safety

where i live (especially in my local region) tourism is huge. especially in winter. and IMHO skiing is one of the most dangerous winter activities you can do. i honestly always bring this up because i think skiing is wrongfully seen as a "casual activity".

having worked in a hospital for some time, you wouldn't believe how many accidents we receive in winter just because of skiing accidents. it's by far the worst time to be working in a hospital and i'm not exaggerating. it's truly insane how easy it is to get injured in a major way while skiing.

you can be the best freaking skiier in your whole ski club, and still get taken out by a single stupid idiot who doesn't know his limits or just doesn't care for the safety of others.

The thing about skiing (and snowboarding) is that improving measurable performance almost always requires taking more risks - harder trails or higher speed. Contrast with running, for example, where increasing speed involves no risk at all. Most people want to improve at what they do, so the ski resorts are filled with people at the edge of their ability, all in proximity to one another. That plus the sheer speed practically guarantees a high injury rate.

Personally, while I do challenge myself in those ways some of the time, I'm just as happy seeing how many turns I can make on a run I've already mastered, or trying to make each turn absolutely perfect. Slight increase in risk, but much less than the human cannonballs I see around me.

i agree, you're never going to be able to ski down a black-level route if you don't take the very first risk: going from blue-level to red-level. but with my prev comment i hope to kind of shed light on how dangerous skiing actually is as i often hear people having very relaxed opinions on skiing so i just feel obligated to share my experience lol

so to lead back to the original comment, i don't think it's ironic at all that Schuhmacher had his accident while skiing instead of driving F1. i consider skiing much more dangerous. however do take that opinion with a grain of salt. i'm not into F1, have never driven a F1 car, never watched a full race and don't know the statistics about average injury rates of F1 drivers. but i do know that the mountains are full of idiots going high speed, which isn't even required to get a high level injury. while on the race track, you drive against other professionals.

I was told that engines were more stable in multiples of 6's from some weird physics going on in the engine. I guess that guy could have been completely full of shit.

That guy was right that there are 6-cylinder configurations with perfect mechanical balance (and not for other cylinder numbers), but the V6 isn't one of them so that's not the reason here.

Its mostly a trigonometry thing, three sine waves 120 degrees out of phase balance out to constant torque. Also see electrical 3-phase power.

Note that internal combustion cylinder pressure is by no means a perfect sine wave LOL but its a close enough approximation to run smoother.

Its partially a physics thing, in that ICE are usually 4-cycle so they fire every other rotation so if you want three firing pistons per rotation separated 120 degrees you'll need six cylinders total.

>electrical 3-phase power.

Thank you for that! Interesting read.

I feel like we should demonetize competitive sports. Sports are wonderful, but money (and maybe fame) incentivizes you past the point where you stop based on how your body feels.

Maybe we miss out on records and storylines, but I think there are much healthier ways of spending our time.

US olympians earn an average of $16,000/year, mostly from part-time jobs that give them extra time to train. If they win gold, they get $40,000 per medal (meaning teams have to split it). Olympians are definitely not in it for the money.

None of these guys were getting paid to be bobsledders. I suppose they get endorsements and such, but they didn't become millionaires based on a salary alone.

> Usually injuries follow power laws

That's a pretty outstanding claim, do you have any evidence for this?

I'd bet a case of beer that OP did operations analysis in his MBA course... The term to google for is "Duane Power Law" or similar. Duane was the first statistical process improvement researcher in the 60s to graph MTBF stats and discover breakdowns follow a power law. There's a lot to see if you google for that.

Of course humans aren't machines... or are we? Pretty weird how wildly different factory floor industrial machinery all follow the same power law. I would be surprised if humans did NOT follow some kind of power law of injuries based on total cumulative energy dissipation in tissue over time or something like that. Humans can heal better than a milling machine or EDM cutter. On the other hand humans take terrible repetitive strain damage, so maybe Duane is right after all.

> would be surprised if humans did NOT follow some kind of power law of injuries based on total cumulative energy dissipation in tissue over time or something like that.

Only if the injury is related to velocity. If it's related to mass, you'd expect linear scaling.

KE = 0.5(M(V^2))

Kinetic Energy is linearly related to Mass and is geometrically related to Velocity.

How about we let people decide on their won what they want to do with their lives?

Generally I'd agree, but there is some rationality to the idea that we should not encourage and promote certain activities because of their inherent dangers. Smoking, for instance.

There is a distinction here that needs to be emphasized. We should absolutely allow people to smoke: what we should limit is the amount of money that goes into marketing, promotion, the big Philip Morris, government lobbying, and a whole bunch of backend work that goes into getting people addicted to Tobacco.

Simply restricting people from smoking is a blanket encroachment of personal liberty and should not be IMO entertained. As far as it doesn't damage others (like Guns), we should allow it.

I think warning labels on Cigarette boxes is an excellent idea - it informs the consumer of facts of consuming the product, whether they choose to do it or not is up to them.

_any_ sport at a high enough level will be bad for your body.

No, sport is dangerous and we must accept this. Otherwise this is a slippery slope and will result in banning sinple things like a slide in soccer or something.

That's nonsense. We can assess risks and determine the probability of injuries and the severity of them, and issue bans accordingly. "If we ban X then W, Y and Z are next" is just fearmongering. There's no reason why we can't ban something without banning other things that are much less dangerous.

Most "slippery slope" arguments are so obviously fallacious I'm surprised people still try to use them.

Horseback riding Is super dangerous

Lots of activities are dangerous. The main problem is that danger is a function of probability (eg how likely are you to get hurt doing that thing), and people are terrible at estimating probability. While horse riding is dangerous in the sense that when you get hurt it's likely to be severe, it's not that dangerous because the probability of being hurt is quite low. Among the millions of people who go horse riding each year very few get badly hurt. What the article is suggesting is for the relatively small number of people who participate in bobsledding a significant number are getting brain injuries.

With google its quite trivial to get actual data rather than estimates.

It doesn't seem controversial that per IIHS stats motorcycles have about 30 times more fatalities per 100K miles than cars.

Likewise I have no reason to disagree with an online Br J Sp Med journal article from '91 that horse riders experience significant accidents once every 350 hours whereas motorcyclists have a serious accident every 7000 hours, or about 20 times more risky, based on ER reports.

So multiplying risk, it seems horse riding is about 600 times more dangerous than passenger car driving.

Another interesting anecdote is "everyone knows" that most accidents happen to noobs because they're distracted so much by learning and not knowing their limitations. So what you're really measuring is the fraction of low time noobs who will be injured by the sport before they escape noob status. That hypothesis would predict that essentially all horse riders will be injured in some way before they escape noob status, a noticeable fraction of motorcycle riders will be injured as noobs although the vast majority will not be injured, and its actually VERY rare for a noob car driver to be injured while learning to drive. In summary, this seems to be a situation where perceived risk matches actual risk.

It would seem as a civilization we do an adequate job preparing teen car drivers as the vast majority of drivers survive their teen driver years, but as a civilization we do a completely inadequate job training horse riders. Or at least based on British data from the 80s as reported thirty years ago; I'm old enough to remember nobody wore bicycle helmets before the 90s; perhaps modern horse rider trainees wear better safety equipment in 2020 than in 1990.

Strange start up tech idea: Smart helmet with GPS and machine vision for horse riders with AI and machine learning to yell in their ear when they're doing something dumb. If essentially all horse riders are injured while learning, they would likely be very motivated to drop some money on your smart AI safety helmet. On the other hand actual risk data indicates a similar product for teen drivers simply wouldn't sell, not having the proposed theoretical magic helm already has a very low accident rate making the helm appear less useful. Edited to note: that's the entire point of my risk rant, do a startup on fixing a problem virtually all of the customers have, not a startup on a problem essentially none of the customers have.

Equestrians are the anti-gymnasts, being among the oldest olympians. Consider Ian Millar's 10 olympic appearances.

(The longer one does it, the safer it gets. A local hospital's emergency room statistics showed the first 200 hours are the most dangerous, declining thereafter.)

The current environment is already a chosen position on a slope. Gymnastics and figure skating have illegal moves. All sports ban some drugs due to their adverse health consequences.

What is considered too dangerous is a constant conversation and continually revised. Your position that we should stand at the top of the slope (allow unbounded danger in sport) is something that most of society feel is extreme.

Near the top of the slope: "open" sports divisions, allowing unlimited doping. Prizes awarded after six months, to any remaining contestants who still pass medical checkup.

Anecdotally, I have a friend on a national skeleton team. He says he's a bit dopey but it's okay because he has a girlfriend to take care of him, and attributes it to lateral acceleration and breathing difficulty. This is after maybe 5 years at longest

> but it's okay because he has a girlfriend to take care of him

Is that okay?

Well that sentence is ambiguous. It could be that the guy on the skeleton team said the following:

"I am a bit dopey, but it's okay because I have my girlfriend to take care of me"

That's the only way to read I was able to find. What's the other?

He says he’s a bit dopey, but I’m okay with that because he has a girlfriend to take care of him.

In that case the subject of the "attributes it" is lost, while with the "he says he's a bit dopey but [he says] it's okay" reading it naturally flows into "and [he] attributes it".

Girlfriend forces him to quit?

This is a pretty sad article. I wonder if they've ever considered g-suits to mitigate the pressure on the body. I'm not sure if it'd be effective but fighter pilots have a pretty similar set of extremes that they work in.

It seems like the pressure isn't the main issue, the vibration/impact is.

Better helmet padding may be able to help significantly here.

I was thinking along the lines that putting high G pressure on your circulatory system is probably putting a lot of stress on the brain that otherwise wound be there. The sled head they talk about seems like it's almost mild hypooxia or something.

Jeremy Clarkson did a pretty good piece on how scary bobsleighs are 10 years ago on Top Gear. Worth taking a peak to see what all the fuss is about.

https://youtu.be/xsac2agog48

And for those interested in what a skeleton looks and feels like. Here's a more recent video.

https://youtu.be/BzxS-3vO6Gw

This is how the world is shaping up -- winner take all, but so much competition to be that winner that the winner's life isn't worth it either.

Competition is weird. There is only one winner and the winner probably gets bored of being the best despite all the sacrifices. Meanwhile all the "losers" look up to the winner and dream of being the winner themselves. I guess it boils down to jealousy. Someone has something you don't have, it doesn't actually matter what the "something" is, it also doesn't matter if you harm yourself in the process.

That's a weird way to look at it; so negative. I think for most people it is more about pride than jealousy.

This is the post religion world, late stage capitalism balls to the walls, no holds barred, sky is the limit libertarian life. Work hard play hard etc.

I hope we can evolve past this mindset to something that is better for people. We need to focus on the health of the human race over the achievements of the human race if we want to survive and thrive long term.

Article isn’t readable on mobile. Any link to just the text?

https://pastebin.com/fHqu5eXF

Thanks a million

Can't scroll past the initial video in Firefox either. Seriously, don't fuck with scrolling.

Same on Chrome...

one more reason to not use buggy broken Firefox, it works fine in outdated Kiwi browser on Android

View it in "Reader" mode.

It should be perfectly readable in any Chromium browser on Android, care to post screenshot?

How terribly sad. Perhaps the speeds of the sled tracks could be reduced. A helmet designed to blunt the millisecond g force spikes could also be developed.

The issue with helmet design is likely the same one football players face: that the place the impact absorbing material needs to go is between skull and brain. There’s no wearable helmet that’s going to change the result of skull being decelerated or accelerated as the brain keeps going.

A strap or some padding that absorbs fleeting contact with the ice maybe has a chance to make a difference, but there are so few people involved in these sports that testing changes scientifically will be very hard.

I'm no expert on helmet design, but surely you can absorb that force elsewhere, as long as the acceleration on the skull is damped? Degenerate case: a car's airbag does not go between my brain and my skull, yet it does prevent my brain from slamming into my skull.

No it doesn't, it prevents your skull from slamming into the steering wheel, lowering the forces inside your skull due to the longer time for deceleration is simply a side effect. Brain buckets are awesome for keeping your skull in one piece. Always have been.

Wouldn’t the fact that your skull decelerates slower against an airbag than against a steering wheel mean that your brain hits your skull with less force?

Yes, that's what it does. It's not zero, but it's definitely less. But you probably only hit an airbag a couple of times max over the course of your lifetime, whereas on the field you'll hit your head the whole game. And I don't know how you could put an airbag in a helmet, there's not enough space to slow your impact

> I don't know how you could put an airbag in a helmet

I own a Hövding, and they're supposedly six-to-eight times better than a traditional cycle helmet (particularly for neck stability):

https://hovding.com/our-vision/

https://news.stanford.edu/2016/10/03/stanford-researchers-sh...

Improvements to traditional helmets can definitely be made, although I'm not sure how practical an airbag helmet is for tobogganing, where it must also resist extended friction and multiple repeat impacts.

Make the helmet bigger, and put a liner filled with gel in it.

Not to be overprotective or anything, but after reading this I am just going to put my kids in giant rolling blocks of gel to keep them safe. Look for my YC Winter ‘21 startup GelBlok.io. If we need another compiler writer I will DM you

Haha, my degree is in mechanical engineering. So I do know a thing or two about kinematics :-)

The nice thing about gel is it squishes out of the way, and that squishing turns the spike into a more gradual push. It wouldn't take much gel to substantially reduce the spices.

Of course, this would have to be tested. It shouldn't be too hard to test various designs.

> a car's airbag does not go between my brain and my skull, yet it does prevent my brain from slamming into my skull

No it doesn’t. The airbag stops your head. It doesn’t stop your brain.

The integral of the force of time would be the same, but one can reduce the spikes in force.

That's essentially what happens when a car is designed to crush, saving the occupants. The deceleration of the occupants is reduced and spread out over a longer period of time, but the total deceleration is the same.

Yes there is, a one-piece helmet-torso design that allows neck flexibility [1] - this is dated 2012, but I remember reading about it even before 2000. Think it will work much better for sled than American football since there should be much less sudden neck movements.

[1] https://cerebrovortex.com/2012/10/04/the-v2-prototype-footba...

Arguably, a slower course could be made more technical, and therefore be a better test of skill over split second reactions.

The Cresta Run has had to find its own underwriter because many refuse to cover sledding. I can't find it now, but at one point I was looking for "extreme sports" cover, and was surprised to see that even in that space, the Cresta was listed as an exception to coverage.

https://www.cresta-run.com/ride-the-cresta/insurance/

I hadn't heard of this institution before, so I was checking out their website. This whole brain injury risk must be why they limit access to women:

https://www.cresta-run.com/ride-the-cresta/ride-the-cresta/

"Ladies will be able to use the Run strictly by invitation, at the discretion of the Committee and under the supervision of the Secretary (or his nominee) on the following occasions:" followed by a few days not even each month.

What a contrast to that Top Gear video linked by someone else (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzxS-3vO6Gw) where the male driver races the British Olympic skeleton gold medalist (skeleton vs car on nearby roads of same distance). Of course the car wins, but least they let her on the track.

/sarcasm

That the St. Moritz Toboggan Club committee sticks by nineteenth century customs in the twenty-first might be circumstantial evidence for the brain-addling effect of too much high-velocity ice time?

that's lot of assumptions why they are taking their lives, but I'm missing comparison with suicide rate in other sports

3 athletes in 7 years in one sport doesn't seem out of ordinary in extremely stressful environment where each millisecond counts

It's high compared to the general population. https://www.ibsf.org/en/athletes?nationality=CAN&gender=M&la... lists all make national team members going back to at least 2010. There are less than 500 national team members listed between the US and Canada. 3 deaths / (500 people *7 years) is 85 deaths per 100000 person years. The normal us rate is closer to 27.

That being said, I agree it would be interesting to know if other speed sports have similarly elevated risks or if it is unique to bobsleigh

I would be curious about explanation for cricket then.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2001/apr/22/sport.ameliahill

The suicide rate among British men is 1.07 per cent, but according to Frith's research, the rate among cricketers here is 1.77 per cent - making them 75 per cent more likely to take their own life.

But the game's toll overseas is even higher. In South Africa 4.12 per cent of players take their own lives. In New Zealand the rate is 3.92 per cent and in Australia 2.75 per cent.

Thank you, the first person who isn't acting emotionally and asking further questions to get to the truth.

Those g numbers are insane. I would appreciate an FFT instead of a time-series graph but this is far beyond even a rocket launch.

There is a huge difference between a prolonged G-force (like a rocket launch or a fighter jet turning) and an instant reading (helmet hitting ice). A prolonged G-force in human performance studies in aviation is defined as 1 second or longer. A reading of more than +10g in the Z-axis will black out almost all humans. While instant readings as high as 200g have been measured in a survivable car crash.

Falling from 1m and stopping in 1cm gets you an instant reading of 100g. And yet that doesn't sound very deadly at all.

>Falling from 1m and stopping in 1cm gets you an instant reading of 100g. And yet that doesn't sound very deadly at all.

It does though, if you fall directly on your head from that height. Even with a helmet that seems dangerous.

I mean the gs/Hz spectrum of a rocket launch.

I think the more these things are talked about the better. The research may not be definitive but people should be more aware of the high-g's, impact of brain injuries on their lives based on the experience shared by top-athletes, cases of suicides etc. It may be an individual's personal decision if they want to get involved in this sport but at least they will be relatively more aware of the potential risks with what they are getting into.

Also, in this day and age of metrics-madness, it is incredible that important measurements such as g-forces (even if just on the helmet) are not routinely recorded and/or shared as part of scores/stats.

So what about Formula 1 drivers ???.

Typically they experience about 5g when braking and 6g whilst cornering on a circuit completing a distance of about 305km.

Steady acceleration when braking is not significant cause.

High g-vibration and concussions from crashes are.

That reminds me of a bad headache I got once after riding on a particularly shaky rollercoaster. It lasted the afternoon and made me feel quite sick. I think some of these rides are not safe either.

How does one possibly elicit causation versus correlation for something like this? There are so many possible variables that could explain the connection (risk-taking behaviour for example).

Question- if this sport has been going on since 1924 why are the athletes only just now starting to take their lives?

They probably have been taking their lives all along.

The knowledge that repeated head traumas can cause suicidality has only been widespread for 10 to 15 years. Before then for example it was commonly believed even by experts that the only head traumas that can cause permanent problems are those where the victim loses consciousness right after the hit.

I wonder if the older courses weren't as extreme? Our sports seem to trend toward breaking limits.

It'd be cool to limit posting by only public resources.

If it complains that you've run out of free articles then just clear the site cookies and data and reload the page (click the padlock next to the url if you're using Firefox).

Thanks, it works! The site collects some kind of a fingerprint, looks like. Private mode chrome opened site asks for account, the same site in firefox, indeed, thinks I'm a new user. Smells like some dirty way of data collection.

Ugh, I cannot get beyond the NYTimes paywall, ever. Something about their paywall standards blocks me out pretty much every time.

If you're using firefox the click on the padlock next to the URL and clear the site's cookies and data, then reload the page.

From my naive understanding based on reading the article, I don't see how sledding is any more of a sport than a video game combined with fear tolerence.

I don't know of any video game where players can actually die if they hit a wall.

Elite sledders are phenomenal athletes, often from a background of sprinting or Olympic weightlifting. Accelerating the sled takes tremendous power and strength.

how... how did you come to that conclusion?

Not OP, but I'm guessing that they think athletes just contribute mass.

Generally they also believe playing/watching sports is mostly pointless and appeal to lesser intelligences.

Apparently they’ve never done a thorough exploration of existentialism or nihilism given how smart they are.

Which is..."not right" is the absolutely most charitable response to 'thinking' that sad.

> I don't see how sledding is any more of a sport than a video game combined with fear tolerence

Video games are a valid group of sports, so that's not a very meaningful assertion.

Our culture is rife with such, arenas where (mostly young) people put their life and health at risk for the merriment of the couch potatoes that make up the bulk of the public.

We can't outlaw it as long as there are people who rely on it for their livelihood, and large swathes of the populace are insensitive to the sufferings of strangers to the point of enjoying it, immensely.

To be fair, a sport like sledding does not exist for the audience as much as for participants themselves. I doubt anyone gets into that sport to make a living out of it. I expect that's the case for most olympic disciplines.

Your critique is fair for a couple of other sports, particularly boxing/fighting and american football.

I don't think people would willingly sacrifice other people's life and health; it's just generally difficult to

- understand long term consequences

- understand risk

- relate to other people's struggles

- work against financial interests (as you mentioned)

Given enough information we can outlaw activities, and in the case of sledding, simply taking it out of the Olympic Games would probably put an end to the sport.

Not sure what to do about my beloved NFL though.

"people put their life and health at risk for the merriment of the couch potatoes"

This is not true. People would do it anyway, it's just that the couch potatoes now provide a way for the people doing it to actually get paid. You cannot be an athlete with your only motivation being 'it'll amuse others'. You need some sort of intrinsic motivation to get at least somewhat good at something. People would fight for fun before the UFC, long before they got paid for it. Same with any other 'extreme' sport. One can argue that the couch potatoes now enable these people to do their activities a lot more, or in more intense ways, but that's a different argument all together imo.

> This is not true

Of course it is not true in an absolute sense, but take away the entertainment business from these risky sports and you'd be left with a mere trickle of people who do it merely for the kicks.

I'm obviously a lone voice in the desert, but I'm fed up with the show of "what a tragedy" and "thoughts and prayers" every time yet another young life gets squashed because a substantial segment of the populace will pay to have a dose of adrenaline through the death defying acts of daring of others, or have their unprocessed and suppressed aggression vented by proxy.

Needs that are nurtured by the industry, with hardly any opposition (nowadays).

I disagree. What sports are we talking about here? The sledding in the OP? Who goes into sledding thinking "whelp I can choose between flipping burgers and sledding, guess I'll go sledding"? I expect exactly 0. This sort of niche sports is all people who are into it a bit or a lot, find out they have a talent for it, and then work their asses off (usually against the odds) to become a professional. These are people who will feel mistreated if their chance of doing what they love and get paid for it is taken away from them, exactly 0 of them will say "thanks for saving my brain there". Someone like that wouldn't get into these sports in the first place.

I know nothing about sledding, but I do know about fighting. I can tell you that the people who fight for a living would do it for free or cost reimbursement too, because that's what they've been doing for years before you got paid real money to fight. When I started training there were a few world class fighters who could live off their fighting career, and there were 10x as many who tried and didn't make it and fought anyway; and then there were 100x as many still who knew from the start they didn't make any chance of being a pro fighter and still trained multiple times a week and fought competition a few times a year, for 'prize money' that didn't even cover the cost of the gloves they were wearing.

Any 'needs' of the audience you're talking about is completely orthogonal to the motivation of people doing risky things.

Isn't this a really small problem? If you were to sort by importance all the problems in the world, how close to the bottom would sledding athletes injurying themselves be?

I feel sorry for those who already incurred lasting damage, but for the rest... it only depends on them to stop.

Why are you wasting all these words on something that is not at the top of your sorted list? What is the most important problem in the world?

> Why are you wasting all these words on something that is not at the top of your sorted list?

I wrote that out of curiosity about why such an article would end up on the front page of HN. Yes, I understand that HN isn't just business and tech, it's "interesting things" - but why is this article interesting? Since I don't find it interesting, maybe some people found this an important issue, I thought?

>I wrote that out of curiosity about why such an article would end up on the front page of HN.

(a) It's a well written and interesting article on a sports issue that most don't know about.

(b) Its TBI implications are generalizable to a lot of popular activities.

We can't have all people working just on most important problems. Many will just waste time doing this (me for example, I don't know how to end poverty), so we have to have people attached to many different problems. Now this problem may not be the most important, but still maybe if someone has time, she should look at it at least briefly?

What authority decides whether a problem is important and how important it is? It probably doesn't or at least shouldn't exist because that power could be equivalent to a dictatorship. Here is a little bit of hyperbole. "Voting for anyone other than Trump for president is not an important problem" The other extreme would be to assign every person on earth to work on fusion power.

Even if we are generous and define importance loosely as reward divided by needed investment (aka ROI) we just end up with the current system. It's still not perfect because it doesn't account for time and corruption. People will optimize for the short term and powerful corporations can create feedback loops by lobbying the government to declare their business as "important" which makes the corporation more powerful and that additional power can be used for lobbying again. However, despite all the shortcomings we still have yet to find a better system.

I just realized that this comment was mostly aimed at doublesCs. Feel free to ignore it.

It's a competition. It only ends when everyone mutually agrees to stop.

hmm no? I walk away when I decide to walk away, regardless of what "everyone" is doing.

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