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Sledding athletes are taking their lives

nytimes.com

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Re: Sledding athletes are taking their lives

#71

Post by topkai22 »

Markoff wrote: post #50

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

Re: Sledding athletes are taking their lives

#72

Post by refurb »

vaidhy wrote: post #37
pengaru wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Sledding athletes are taking their lives

#73

Post by trianglem »

gnramires wrote: post #19

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…

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.

Re: Sledding athletes are taking their lives

#74

Post by ashtonkem »

frutiger wrote: post #58
ashtonkem wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Sledding athletes are taking their lives

#76

Post by bryanrasmussen »

djmips wrote: post #60
frutiger wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 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.

Re: Sledding athletes are taking their lives

#77

Post by mschuster91 »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #13

> 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'…

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.

Re: Sledding athletes are taking their lives

#78

Post by onion2k »

trianglem wrote: post #73
gnramires wrote: post #19

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…

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.

Re: Sledding athletes are taking their lives

#79

Post by puranjay »

Swizec wrote: post #39
gnramires wrote: post #19

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…

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 somethin…

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

Re: Sledding athletes are taking their lives

#80

Post by DoingIsLearning »

mam2 wrote: post #70
ehnto wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you used a helmet before? They don't track the heads movement very well. It's not that they lag behind or anything, they just move in completely different directions willy nilly. Even tight ones will have much sharper acceleration changes as they bounce around. I regularly wear a full face helmet with tight fitment and straps and it is moving way more than my head is. Is that notsosmart enough?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-pass_filter

The helmet and head are too loosely mechanically coupled.

Let's say you have acccelerometer data from a sensor on the helmet and you pass it through an LPF:

If you have the helmet bobbying at really high forces you over-represent real G forces and you are right that you could negate that with filtering.

_However_, if you have really high forces transmitted from the bobsleigh up to the torso/neck/head it is possible that the inertia of the loosely coupled helmet makes it not register the full force as propagated through the tightely coupled torso/neck/head and you underrepresent the real G forces experienced by the brain/skull.

Accelerometer sensors should be coupled with the skull for proper risk/hazard assessment.

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