Olympic ski season opening marred by dangerous course debate

When Mikaela Shiffrin started skiing again weeks after her terrifying crash last year, the American star was even more alert to the potential dangers of training courses.

Shiffrin’s injuries – a puncture wound to her abdomen and severe damage to her abdominal muscles – came in a World Cup giant slalom race. But the two-time Olympic champion knew that training could be just as risky.

If not more.

“When I came back from injury, I was aware of the fencing on the side and a hole in the course and where the trees were,” Shiffrin said in a recent interview.

“We are often training in conditions where the variables are just too many to control and you have to decide sometimes: Is this unreasonably dangerous, or is this within a reasonable level of danger that we need to train, we need to practice, and this is the only way we can do it?”

French skier Alexis Pinturault had similar experiences.

“We are training in many places where it’s not really safe, yes, that’s 100 percent sure,” the 2021 men’s overall World Cup champion said.

Ongoing safety discussions in Alpine skiing came into fresh focus in September – less than five months before the Olympics in Milan Cortina, Italy – when World Cup racer Matteo Franzoso died following a crash in preseason training in Chile.

The 25-year-old Italian crashed through two layers of safety fencing on a course at La Parva and slammed into a wooden fence positioned 6-7m (20-23ft) outside the course. He died two days later from cranial trauma and a consequent swelling of his brain.

Franzoso was the third young Italian skier to die in less than a year, and a talented French skier died following a training crash in April.

Are the risks life-threatening in skiing?

Shiffrin, a five-time overall champion and winner of a record 101 World Cup races, dealt with lingering post-traumatic stress disorder when she got back on skis again after her injuries.

Nearly three months after her crash, she returned to racing in late February.

“Athletes and coaches and everybody are so used to saying that the sport carries an inherent risk that you start to become blind to some of the risks that are actually life-threatening,” Shiffrin said.

“This was a challenge for me, that I felt so scared of the risk for the rest of the season. If you think too much about it, you become paralysed. But it’s really important that we can assess what those risks are and try to find ways to mitigate that as much as possible. It’s not OK to say risk is part of the sport and you take it or leave it.”

The issue with training courses is that, for financial reasons, they usually lack the same safety standards that apply to race courses.

Smaller crews of course workers are on the hill to maintain the condition of the snow surface; less safety netting is placed along the course to break the fall when racers crash; and fewer medical staff and equipment, like helicopters for immediate transport to a hospital, are available.

Sofia Goggia, the 2018 Olympic downhill champion from Italy, called ski racing “an extreme sport” and said “at a high level, it’s like F1 or MotoGP in downhill, super-G, but also giant slalom; because the speed is 80-90km/h [50-56mph], the risk is there every time.”

Are more nets the solution for teams ahead of the Winter Olympics?

In races, courses are safer thanks to an abundance of nets, according to Goggia. But she pointed out that just