Speed skiing can be a life threatening crapshoot
Commentary By ADAM TANOUS
What most good skiers and boarders fail to acknowledge is that they
can be in control up to and until the very moment that they are not in control.
Speed kills.
So we were told as small children of the 60s. As it happens, the ads
we were bombarded with were referring to the drug, methamphetamine. Thirty-five years
later, albeit in another context, the message is still relevant.
Speed permeates our lives. From the gigahertz microprocessors we
demand, to the way we drive, to the way we ski, we are a nation addicted to speed. Faster
is assumed to be better. We are always in a rush, though it is never absolutely clear what
for. Given the grim facts of our mortality, I suppose it is a natural enough reaction to
hurry, even if the effort is misplaced.
Last week on Baldy, two people collided leaving one of the skiers to
be life-flighted to Boise, the other with a plethora of serious injuries at the Wood River
Medical Center. Given the extent of the injuries, it is a fairly safe assumption that at
least one of the parties was moving at a good clip. Having worked on the Sun Valley ski
patrol for several years, I have picked up the pieces enough times to be a little gun-shy
about speed. It has, and does, kill people. Good people, good skiers, fathers, mothers,
sons and daughters have all fallen victim to speed.
Bald Mountain is peppered with little memorials—some official,
some not—where people have suffered dearly the consequences of speed. Why is speed
the demon that ruins lives? It goes back to physics: the kinetic energy of any moving
object. The energy a body absorbs when it impacts a fixed or almost fixed object during a
crash is proportional to the square of its velocity.
In other words, the pounding a body takes in a 30 miles per hour
crash is not just double what it would take for a crash at 15 miles an hour. It is four
times as great. If one triples his speed, say from 15 to 45 miles an hour, the energy one
must absorb increases by a factor of nine.
If one likes to think in words, the danger increases a lot faster
than does the thrill level.
So, logically, it doesn’t make sense to ski at high rates of
speed. Of course, human nature isn’t entirely rational. Many people simply enjoy the
sensation of speed. With speed comes a certain sense of power. And power has always been
fundamentally appealing to people.
Perhaps, from an abstract point of view, a brief sense of power means
something to creatures who ultimately have limited control over destiny. The other
possibility is that our attraction to speed is simply physiological: the adrenaline
released when one perceives imminent danger heightens our sense of being alive.
Whatever the reason, it is a fact of life that a certain percentage
of the population enjoys skiing extremely fast. While a lot of people complain to the
guest services and the patrol about speeders on Baldy, just as many resent being told to
slow down. The response one gets from these people is not only a reflection of the Western
ethic of personal freedom, but it speaks to a fundamental fallacy of the fast and
accomplished.
Of the many times that I have talked to people about skiing or
boarding too fast, the most common response has been either that he or she was in
"total control" or that he or she is such a strong skier that speed isn’t
an issue. Oftentimes, both statements are true. There are an inordinate number of
extremely good skiers and boarders on Baldy, and yet they are seriously injured or die no
less frequently than anywhere else.
And this brings me to the fundamental nature of accidents: they are
totally unforeseeable and often unimaginable. It is a concept lost on the
accomplished skier. What most good skiers and boarders fail to acknowledge is that they
can be in control up to and until the very moment that they are not in control. In just
the last few years, I can think of three expert skiers who were skiing fast and in control
until the split second that something unpredictable occurred. All three either died or
suffered severe head injuries.
What it comes down to is that one can control his own skiing motions,
but he or she cannot control the outside variables. One can’t predict the actions of
other skiers, nor the response of every patch of snow in his or her path. When one is
really skiing fast, all he has to do is lose an edge for a millisecond, fail to focus on
his line, not see a rut in the shadows. Then it is a crapshoot as to whether one survives
the fall. Unfortunately, the odds of physics are working against a guy or gal at that
point.
Denying one’s fallibility is, sadly, a quality that our culture
tends to reward. The ancient Greeks would have called it hubris, an attitude for which one
might be punished. We call it confidence, a can-do attitude, leadership material.
Part of the problem with speed is that it is a relative experience.
We tend to get numb to it. I will never forget getting in my car after spending 21 days
kayaking the Colorado River. Driving 30 miles an hour down a dirt road out of Lake Mead I
felt like I was breaking the land speed record at Bonneville. It works the other way too.
The more accustomed we are to speed, the more comfortable we are. A good question to ask
yourself when you feel yourself clipping along on skis is: would you jump out of a car at
this speed?
It is at the point of comfort that we must take pause. It is the
point at which we are most vulnerable. It is when the blow from nowhere rains down on us.
What we cannot see can hurt us. Pretending that we can anticipate all of the
variables is the ugly side of conceit.
After all, it is not he who skis fastest who wins. Eventually, we all
lose our speed. The guy who skis longest wins. It is a sport of survival.
Every now and then I run into 80- and 90-year-old skiers and, I
think, they have won the race. They are still out there in the cold, clear air.
They get to feel their bodies working in the crisp sunshine. They get to ski with
grandchildren between their legs. They return, over and over again, to the myriad of
places on the mountain that have so swiftly and silently taken others away.
