Information about a piece of news titled 1st study to analyze injury situations in World Cup Freestyle Ski Cross
1st study to analyze injury situations in World Cup Freestyle Ski Cross
Intoduction
A new study from the OSTRC is the first study to describe injuries in ski cross, based on systematic video analyses of 33 injury cases. Personal mistakes at take-off and contact often caused an uncontrolled flight, unbalanced landings and subsequent injury.
Although injury risk in Freestyle Ski Cross (SX) is high – many and in addition serious knee, fracture and head injuries occurred during recent World Cup seasons and the Vancouver Olympics
– little is known about the situations leading up to this amount of time-loss injuries.
4 World Cup seasons, 33 injury videos, 5 experts
A total of 33 video recordings of SX timeloss injuries were collected through the International Ski Federation Injury Surveillance System for 4 World Cup seasons (2006/2007 through 2010) and were suitable for further video analysis.
5 experts in the fields of sport medicine and SX analyzed each case to describe in detail the situation leading up to the injury (skiing situation and skier behavior).
Loss of control and out of balance!
The descriptive video analysis of the injury cases revealed that skiers lose control and become unbalanced before the time of injury, thus sustaining an injury when landing/falling after the previous obstacle, usually a jump or a turn.
4 main injury situations dominated by jumping situations
The primary cause of injury was unintentional skier-opponent contact in jumping, bank turning and roller situations.
Another common cause of injury was personal errors (inappropriate technique and strategy) at take-off and in turning situations.
How will these findings help to reduce injury risk?
The current findings suggest that reducing the number of narrow parts and increasing the space between obstacles (especially jumps into compressions, turns into jumps, etc) to a minimum standard determined by FIS could be beneficial, even though the majority of the jumping-related injuries were caused by a personal mistake at take-off or skier–opponent contact, and not by the design of the jump itself.
Also, attention should be directed at the jumping and landing areas in relation to the jump profile, course width at take-off and, most importantly, the landing area.
This study was conducted by Stefan Randjelovic, Stig Heir, Lars Nordsletten, Tone Bere og Roald Bahr.
Download the paper in British Journal of Sports Medicine.