Citation

Hubbard M, Swedberg AD, Johnson RJ, Shealy JE, Greenwald RM, Scher IS. Ski. Trauma Saf. 2012; 19: 75-94.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2012, ASTM International)

DOI

10.1520/STP104515

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Epidemiological studies of ski resort injuries have found that terrain parks, especially jumps, present a significantly greater injury risk to skiers and snowboarders than other more typical skiing activities. It has also been shown that the severity of impact risk can be characterized by equivalent fall height (EFH), a measure of jumper impact velocity normal to the slope, and that design algorithms exist to calculate landing-surface shapes that limit EFH to arbitrarily low values. Although proposals have been made recently to introduce design, the skiing industry and other authors have objected that analysis, design, and standards are impossible because of various "uncontrollable" factors that allegedly make the problem intractable to analytical design techniques. We consider the list of uncontrollable factors one by one and show that, to the contrary, each is either: (1) irrelevant to design, (2) has negligible effect, if any, on designed EFH, or (3) can be directly incorporated into the design process.

Language: en