For the second time in so many months, Canada is mourning the loss of one of its most promising skiers.
Nik Zoricic, 29, died on Saturday after crashing during a high-speed, ski cross race in Switzerland. Zoricic’s death comes just two months after Canadian freestyle skier Sarah Burke, also 29, died in a training accident in Park City, Utah.
The dual tragedies have raised questions about whether extreme sports are worth the potential costs.
Global News talked to Jon Heshka, a professor at Thompson Rivers University’s Adventure Studies Department and Faculty of Law about whether extreme sports are worth the risk of death and whether they can be made safer.
Q: Yesterday’s news left many shocked that a young man could lose his life so quickly while playing a sport he loved. But given the risks, how surprised should we be?
A: What happened to Nik and what happened to Sarah are terribly tragic and we should feel a profound sense of sadness, but surprise or shock shouldn’t be the feelings we have.
How can we be surprised? He was rubbing shoulders with three other racers at 60 kilometres an hour. It should be anything but surprising, but it is extremely sad.
Q: Are these extreme sports worth the risks?
A: That’s an impossible question to answer and has to be grounded in context. It used to be that extreme sport was done strictly for personal, intrinsic reasons. People would ski mad lines or difficult routes just because they were there. They did it for their own reasons.
Now we compete in extreme sports and others create the rules around which the sports are created, so the motivations are different. Two fatalities in less than two months ought to open our eyes about the hazards people are opening themselves up to.
Q: In making these sports competitive instead of recreational, are we putting too much pressure on athletes?
A: Without question the pressures change. They are either incentivized by the prospects of winning a medal or by the promise of sponsorship dollars generated by winning. I think the athletes have to be honest those are motivators. There’s nothing wrong with that. We just have to be honest about that.
I don’t think we are pushing them too hard, but we are setting them up to fail on these courses. The consequences of making a mistake shouldn’t be someone dying.
Q: Yesterday athletes like ski cross gold medalist Ashleigh McIvor defended the safety of her sport, saying that she has unfortunately has lost friends on the mountains, but her friends in cities lose friends in car crashes.
A: Athletes are going to make their own decisions about whether the risks are too high, so how do we keep people safe while letting them make choices?
I think folks have disingenuously tried to connect the risks in extreme sports to other activities saying things like these sports are no more dangerous than driving a car. That’s just not true.
The risks are profoundly different and there has to be a balance between the risks these athletes are prepared to take and the risks intentionally engineered in the race courses.
We have to be honest here. I think these governing bodies have to step up and ask are these the costs we have to accept? Is it okay for an athlete to die on a course?
Q: Some of these extreme sports were just recently introduced in mainstream competitions like the Olympics. How often do sports federations step back and pull a sport from competition?
A: They don’t, but it’s not unusual in sport for them to recalibrate. For example, Formula 1 figured out the hundreds of millions of dollars car manufacturers were investing in machines were taking the sport too fast. The F1 organization put rules in place to slow them down. Then you have luge and other sliding sports, especially in light of what happened during the last Olympics, trying to put caps on the speeds at which athletes compete. I don’t think we should default to faster is better all the time. We are not going to eliminate all risks. That would be boring. I just don’t think we should crank it up in terms of exposure level.
Q: We’ve talked about what event organizers should do, but what should athletes be thinking about?
A: I really appreciated and respected the views of Canadian skier Kelly VanderBeek, perhaps because she is a veteran on the ski circuit and has seen a lot, and perhaps that has given her a certain measure of perspective and wisdom. She’s talked about no one having to pay this price and is an advocate of adopting those speed reducing measures.
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