New airbag rule for speed racers at ski World Cup spawns many questions, few answers
CBC
A new rule for certain alpine World Cup ski events has become a major talking point among athletes.
In early November, alpine's governing body (FIS) announced that racers in speed events (downhill and super-G) would be mandated to wear airbags in competition.
The wearable technology, made by the Italian company Dainese, fits like a vest over an athlete's shoulders and upper torso and has been in development since 2013.
It's designed to go off in crashes, lessening impact and improving safety in a sport which has seen major injuries strike the likes Mikaela Shiffrin, Aleksander Aamodt Kilde and Canada's Valerie Grenier in recent years.
But Brodie Seger, a skier from North Vancouver, B.C. who is on the athlete council at Alpine Canada, said he and his teammates are dubious about some the immediate and unintended consequences of the new airbag law.
"What I think doesn't sit entirely well with a lot of my teammates is that there's still a lot of questions that revolve around it and how some things are going to work in practice," Seger said. "So I don't think anybody's … entirely satisfied, shall we say, with the way it's been communicated."
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The Canadians are not alone. Last week, the German publication Blick reported that 40 athletes had already applied for exemptions, which are meant to be limited to people with medical reasons only.
Seger said he's in a WhatsApp group with athletes from each country on the World Cup circuit in which a poll was recently posed with a yes-or-no question: should airbags be mandatory or not?
The results came back nearly even.
"I think the main question that athletes have is whether this is truly an effective way to reduce injury in our sport. I think the majority of the data for these things comes from MotoGP, for example. And obviously they've been collecting data with ski racing over the last number of years," Seger said.
"But already there's been a couple situations to my knowledge where when an athlete had a crash and sustained an injury, there were people pointing fingers at the airbag itself."
Swiss skier Michelle Gisin shared a similar concern with Blick.
"I was never against the airbag, but I am still against making it compulsory because we are not yet at the point where we are better protected in every case of a fall," Gisin said.
