The skeleton seems insane but with my limited watching I haven’t seen accidents. The downhill is also insane and there have been some injuries. Some of the figure skaters are getting hurt because they press the routine too far. Hockey is always inherently dangerous because you can become the target of another human being and injuries can happen to any part of the body.
So what is the most dangerous sport we are watching these weeks?
Luge has higher top speeds than skeleton… I would say the downhill in alpine skiing and luge, mostly because of these speeds, and the fact athletes have actually died during these sports.
Biathlon, if you’re a target.
Most of the X-Games-ish sports that have been added in the past couple of decades can be pretty nasty. Moguls in particular would seem to beat up your knees even if you don’t end up with the array of ACL tears, concussions and the like that pretty much every competitor seems to have.
Well, luge killed someone in Vancouver.
Snowboarder Sarah Burke was killed in training for the Sochi games.
Luge looks dangerous and it can be but the overall serious injury and death rate is fairly low from what I have read. The most common injury is abrasive ice burn if you lose your track but it isn’t generally deadly and doesn’t usually cause any lasting injuries. I think the answer is downhill alpine skiing. It is dangerous on many levels: you can get anything from serious orthopedic injuries to death even at the amateur levels and it never gets that much safer because Olympic skiiers crank up the difficulty to the point they are pushing their own skill limits to or past the reasonable maximum.
With downhill skiing, you are always just a few seconds away from blowing out your knees permanently or getting killed in some freak chain of events that leads to a collision with terrain. Ask Sonny Bono, Michael Kennedy at the amateur level or Sarah Burke at the Olympic level about that. You can never be get enough at that sport to be immune to those sorts of risks.
According to Wikipedia there have been 4 winter Olympic deaths - 2 in luge.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympic_deaths
Luge can certainly kill you if things go wrong but death is not the totality of the serious injury rates either. You have to define this question well to see what you really want to know. You will get traumatic injuries from luge but you you won’t see many orthopedic injuries because it is a sport that that simply requires someone to lay down on a sled (how does someone even get involved in that sport in the first place? Who has an amateur luge track to see if they are good it?).
Downhill skiing can kill anyone at any level but the rate of serious injury is much higher than any other common sport that I know of. You can blow out your knees, hips or get a series of serious concussions just through training or even a recreational jaunt. I never never understood why someone thought that simply strapping expensive sticks to your feet would allow someone to jump off of things at high speeds you would never consider otherwise but that is just the way downhill skiing works. I am on a prayer list now for someone how went to Colorado and smashed into a tree. The question is whether she will die or just be disabled for life.
Downhill skiing has got to be up there. I recall going to Kitzbuhel on my honeymoon in the summer and being too scared to even walk down the “Mausefalle”. It takes balls to ski it full bore.
Also we ski in a little Austrian village called “Rauris” and right in the town square is a memorial to Ulii Maier who was killed in a world cup race in 1994. Rather concentrates the mind when you pass it on the way to slopes of a morning (and the kids go to her father’s ski-school as well)
Burke was a skiier, actually.
Anyway… Jeez, I dunno. They ALL look dangerous to me. Hockey, figure skating, ski jumping, snowboarding, speed skating, skeleton, luge… “all these people are crazy,” as I’ve commented more than once while watching.
And that’s without mentioning the sport in which you actually carry a gun.
Scariest-looking? I’m gonna go with skeleton. You’re traveling up to 80 mph on a sled, making treacherous curves, going head-first, face-down, with your head about six inches from the ice. That sounds like a sport started by a few drunken Alaskan teenagers playing Truth or Dare.