Don't know where this originated but...
Alan Griffiths loves skiing. The 48-year-old gave up his job as a GP in a North Wales practice to run a medical centre in Val d’Isere just so he could live closer to the mountains. Yet even though his commute has taken him past some of the finest snow in Europe every day for the last 15 years, he has long since abandoned the slopes.
“To be quite honest, I thought it was too dangerous,” he says. “I have seen too many people with much more experience than me at reading the off-piste conditions – local guides who were born and bred here – get it wrong. And skiing on piste, after so long, is just like going for a walk, so I don’t ski or snowboard any more.”
After Michael Schumacher became the latest casualty of the mountains last week, Dr Griffiths will not be alone in thinking twice before taking to the powder again. For the seven-time Formula One champion, like Dr Griffiths’s friends, was an experienced skier, an habitué of slopes at the resorts of Madonna di Campiglio in the Italian Dolomites and Meribel in the French Alps, where last Sunday he fell and catapulted headfirst onto a rock. Despite his cautious decision to wear a helmet, on Friday fans were forced to mark his 45th birthday with a vigil outside a hospital in Grenoble, as he remained in an artificial coma inside, surrounded by his family.
It was only the latest high-profile skiing accident to attract headlines in recent years. In August last year, Prince Friso of the Netherlands, the younger brother of the Dutch king, died after spending 18 months in a coma. He had been buried in snow by an avalanche while skiing in western Austria. And in 2009, Natasha Richardson, the award-winning actress, died from a head injury during a private skiing lesson at the exclusive Mont Tremblant resort in Canada.
For the 900,000 Britons who go on skiing holidays each year, such reports make alarming reading. And although the number of skiing fatalities and injuries has remained relatively constant in recent years, the injuries have grown steadily more severe. According to Medecins de Montagne, a group of French Alpine doctors, the proportion of serious injuries in France has climbed over the last dozen years, with those “heavily wounded” representing 5.2 percent of all injured skiers last year, compared to 3.95 percent in 2001, meaning over 1,000 more skiers were hospitalised by an accident last year than 12 years ago.
Such statistics have not escaped the attention of Dr Griffiths, who gave up the sport when his two daughters were born. He has decided to wait until his children – now 13 and 11 – are “old enough to fend for themselves” before he returns to the slopes. His decision is understandable, given that his patients serve as a daily reminder of the mountains' danger. Even since Schumacher’s accident, a further 49 of them have limped, or been carried, into his surgery at the resort's English Medical Centre, ranging from the very young to 80-year-olds.
On Thursday, his busiest day of the season so far, he dealt with 16 fresh accidents, including a ten-year-old with a broken leg, and another child who had banged his head during a race. “I see everything that comes off the slopes,” he explains. “Yesterday, I saw somebody with a very unusual fracture to his jaw; the other day I saw somebody with a ruptured spleen. On Thursday, I sent four [patients] down to the hospital.”
On the same day, John Ellis finally flew back to his home on the Isle of Man. The 76-year-old was meant to be enjoying a month’s skiing with his wife, but had spent the previous two weeks recovering from a collision that left him with nine broken ribs.
About a fortnight into their holiday, the couple were skiing leisurely down a beginners’ slope, on their way to buy a coffee in the Tignes resort, when a fellow skier, who was haring down the mountain at around 50mph, tripped and slipped straight into Mr Ellis.
“His heels hit my toes,” he recalls. “I was thrown up into the air, my skis flew off and I lost consciousness before I hit the ground. Looking at my X-rays, my chest landed on the edge of his skis.”
The skier who caused the accident fled without seeking help, leaving Mr Ellis’s wife to summon paramedics, who put her husband into a straitjacket and a neck brace before dragging him off the slopes in a blood wagon. He spent 10 nights in hospital in Bourg-Saint-Maurice. “I thought I was never going to recover. I have seen people get into these smashes at my sort of age and never get back to full health. For five days, I was completely immobile.”
Mr Ellis, who has been skiing for 30 years, is certain that the risk of collision has increased recently. “I have had a number of near-misses,” he says. “Some of the professional ski instructors are now leaving their clients far too quickly. People who are not really competent skiers feel that they are, and go at a dangerous speed in no time at all.”
Fred Foxon, who has skied at 70 resorts and acts as an expert witness in ski injury litigation, says that skiers now put themselves at greater risk of injury. “When things do go wrong, they go wrong spectacularly,” he says. “We are seeing more chest, arm, collarbone and head injuries because people are hitting the deck harder.”
Marc-Herve Binet has observed this transformation at first hand. The 65-year-old doctor has treated patients at the medical centre in the resort of Avoriaz for the past 40 years, and now responds to about 45 injuries a day. Resorts, he says, have become more adept at “grooming” the snow, meaning there are fewer broken legs caused by tripping over obstacles. However, this improvement has had unintended consequences. “Now everything is very flat, not very good skiers are still able to ski very fast,” he explains. “They are not able to control their speed, and so we have more collisions.”
In fact, the Medecins de Montagne research shows that a third of head injuries are now caused by collisions with another skier, which are only made more likely by the increasing popularity of skiing, making slopes ever more crowded.
The increasing use of helmets (now worn by more than a third of skiers in French resorts) is also controversial. Schumacher’s doctors indicated he would by now be dead without the protection his provided, and research shows they can reduce the force of a collision more than threefold. Nevertheless, there are those who believe that they make skiers more likely to take risks. “There is some evidence that people wearing helmets feel more invulnerable and therefore behave less responsibly,” says Mr Foxon.
Fabrice Jolly, a paramedic for the Val d’Isere ski patrol for the last 15 years, has witnessed such a rise in thrill-seeking, especially among young skiers inspired by the daring exploits they see in online videos. “People are skiing way too fast and don’t respect the limits on the piste,” he says. “We call them blue run world champions – which is why we see more injuries on those kind of [basic] slopes than even on black runs. If you want to be safe, you need to put a bit of humility in your backpack.”
Changes in the design of skis have also encouraged greater risk-taking, with more skiers than ever venturing off-piste. “Skis used to be long, skinny things that steered the same way as large sections of skirting board,” says Mr Foxon. “Now they are shorter and wider, so rather than sinking deeply into the snow pack when you are off-piste, they ‘float’ nearer to the surface. It means it is possible for people who have very little mountain awareness to get themselves into lethal terrain where they are subject to avalanche risk.” He claims the number of off-piste skiers has doubled in the past 20 years.
Avalanches are risky for even the most experienced skier. Alpine resorts were put on high alert just after Christmas after they claimed seven lives in two days. Less than a month ago, 16-year-old Cameron Bespolka from Winchester, Hampshire, was killed in an avalanche in Austria that left his father, Kevin, seriously injured.
Despite such precedents, nobody expects many skiers to abandon the Alps. Risk cannot be mitigated entirely but can be dramatically reduced by skiing within one’s limits, according to Peter Hamlyn, a consultant neurological surgeon at London’s Snowsports Injuries Centre. “Per hour of participation, skiing is dwarfed by point-to-point horse riding, which is one of the most dangerous sports in Britain,” he insists, arguing that the risk of drowning also makes fly fishing more dangerous.
Indeed, the same Medecins de Montagne figures show that the average skier can only expect to be injured around three times for every 1,000 days on the slope, while death is even less probable: in the Austrian Alps, 38 people were killed last season, compared to around 20 each year in France.
So John Ellis, now finally able to leave his bed, will not be deterred. “We ski between 6,000 and 10,000 feet above the sea,” he says. “You’re above the weather, above pollution, breathing in clean, cold, dry air. It is just such satisfaction. So, yes: I will go back.”
