Alpine Canada wants slower racers and courses to cut down on injuries

<p>CALGARY – Slowing ski racers and the courses they race down are among Alpine Canada’s plans for making the sport safer.</p> <p>The country’s governing body of alpine skiing concluded a two-day safety summit Wednesday at Canada Olympic Park. Ten skiers on the national ski team have suffered long-term injuries over the past two seasons.</p> <p>Alpine Canada called for a safety summit to assure parents that ski racing is safe for their children.</p> <p>Raising the age at which a skier can race speed events from 16 years old to 18 is one of the measures Alpine Canada will implement for next winter. Speed events are downhill and super-G, while the shorter, slower races of slalom and giant slalom are called technical races.</p> <p>Before teenagers can participate in speed races, they’ll have to participate in at least one skills camp which give them the tools to handle higher speeds.</p> <p>”That’s great,” national team ski racer Kelly VanderBeek said Wednesday. “There will be speed elements introduced at 12. You can train speed elements for a long time and still be trying to master them.</p> <p>”Doing more camp-based speed training will have a much better impact on developing our athletes and lowering risk of injury.”</p> <p>Alpine Canada also plans to institute a system to track injuries for every racer across the country. The rational for that is, if coaches and team doctors have that information, they can better manage the athlete.</p> <p>Injecting courses with water is a controversial issue in ski racing. The practice prevents courses from breaking down under the weight of racers and in warm conditions, but it makes courses icy and dangerous.</p> <p>Alpine Canada CEO Max Gartner says injection needs be halted at domestic, developmental races, but he stopped short of banning it completely.</p> <p>”Generally we will not inject because we don’t want to race on skating rinks. We want to go on hard-packed snow,” he explained. “Only if there is a significant need to make the courses harder, we will maybe use injectional water.”</p> <p>Courses also have to be tailored to weather conditions.</p> <p>”The theme should be to always be to err on the slow side,” Gartner said. “It’s about keeping the speeds down in all disciplines.”</p> <p>National team and provincial association personnel attended the two-day summit. FIS is the world governing body of the sport and sent Dr. Erich Mueller from the University of Salzburg as its delegate.</p> <p>Alpine Canada has authority over racing within Canada, but the World Cup events held annually in this country fall under the authority of FIS.</p> <p>Gartner wants to make back braces for racers mandatory and strongly recommends they wear mouth guards to prevent mouth and jaw injuries.</p> <p>”We see a lot of people smashing their teeth on gates,” he said.</p> <p>Alpine Canada is proposing to FIS making the skintight suits racers wear less aerodynamic. Gartner would like to see that changed for the 2011-2012 World Cup season.</p> <p>”To do the responsible thing, we have to reduce speeds,” Gartner said. “An equipment change at the international level is imminent. We have one more year to deal with the equipment we have right now.</p> <p>”If anything we’ll err on the conservative side at the moment to keep our athlete pool large. We don’t want to lose athletes so early to injury or to fear of getting into the sport.”</p> <p>The skinsuits are not much thicker than a bathing suit and leave little to the imagination. A mantra among those who wear them is “skin to win” meaning the less clothing the faster.</p> <p>VanderBeek is willing to wear a slower suit if FIS makes it mandatory for all racers.</p> <p>”That should be a no-brainer,” she said. “That should slow us down standing up as well as falling. You won’t fall and speed up. We just don’t need to have our suits be that fast.”</p> <p>VanderBeek, who lives in Chilliwack, B.C., hasn’t raced since Dec. 17, 2009, when she tore ligaments and suffered two fractures in her knee in Val-d’Isere, France. The injuries cost the 28-year-old a berth in the 2010 Winter Olympics and the last season and a half of World Cup racing.</p> <p>Vanderbeek gave an athlete’s point of view at the summit. The danger and risk of racing draws a large television audience and benefits the sport financially.</p> <p>Speed doesn’t translate well on a small screen, however, and both she and Gartner believe the glamour of the sport won’t decrease with a reduction in speed.</p> <p>”We don’t have to change our sport to make it safer,” VanderBeek said. “We need to slow us down a bit. If they filmed our sport better, they could slow us down 10 to 20k and put the cameras in more interesting positions, embedded in jumps and things like that and it would be more exciting for those watching at home.</p> <p>”At the World Cup level, it will always be an inherently dangerous sport. However, it doesn’t need to be this dangerous. It’s taken a quantum leap in the severity of some of the injuries.”</p>