Sarah Burke's death leads to questions about safety

Sarah Burke's death leads to questions about safety

Sarah Burke's death leads to questions about safety, As members of the action sports community mourn the loss of freestyle skier Sarah Burke, they are also left to defend their sports amid questions about safety.

"The initial sadness was obviously for her and her family," said Keir Dillon, X Games host and former snowboarder. "Partially, I think a lot of the sadness was just the perception of action sports … and the dangers of it. The perception and the reality of it, both."

Dillon said news of Burke's death Thursday reminded him of when he first heard about Kevin Pearce's injury two years ago. Pearce suffered a traumatic brain injury after falling during training at the same halfpipe where Burke was injured in Park City, Utah.

"When you get news like that, you're pretty crushed," Dillon said.

Although he calls these events "isolated," Dillon said it is natural to doubt the safety of halfpipe sports.

"You forget how skilled and calculated the athletes that are doing these tricks and making this their lives are," said Dillion, who runs a company that makes headphones with Pearce and a group of professional snowboarders. "For me, even now being removed from it, I forget that they're not just crazy stunt kids trying to make money."

"It is easy to just feel like it should be governed, but also, if you dig deep, it is safer than you actually think," Dillon continued.

Ski and snowboard athletes work to ensure their own safety, Dillon said. He noted the push by athletes to increase the wall height of halfpipes from 18 to 22 feet. While larger halfpipes increase an athlete's speed, the extra wall height allows for longer transitions so athletes don't feel as much g-force.

"If you were to drop a snowball on a 22-foot pipe, it only lands, let's say, an eighth of the way down. If you do that on an 18-foot halfpipe, it lands half of the way down," Dillon explained. "If you have any sort of misjudgment, you can land in the middle of the halfpipe. That's where injuries happen … it allows your margin of error to be greater."

The larger halfpipes became the Olympic standard at the 2010 Vancouver Games. The 22-foot halfpipe at Park City Mountain Resort, where Pearce and Burke both fell, is frequented by professional athletes and was among the first of the larger pipes in North America. (Pearce recently returned to snowboarding for recreation.)

"It's one of the best pipes in the world and they do a good job of maintaining a 22-foot halfpipe all season long," Dillon said. "I think that's why you hear about Kevin's incident there. In creating the best pipe, [they] allowed the best athletes to come and train there."

There are now about a dozen parks in the United States offering both private and public use of 22-foot halfpipes, including Buttermilk Mountain in Aspen, Colo., where Burke was scheduled to compete later this week at the X Games.

Dillon had the opportunity to work with Burke, a six-time Winter X Games gold medalist, at last year's competition.

"[She had] that super mellow attitude," Dillon said of Burke's work off the pipe. "I'm sure her competitors might not say that she was mellow, but you can just tell that she had fun with life. She really enjoyed it."

X Games officials are finalizing plans for a memorial tribute to Burke, according to ESPN spokesperson Danny Chi. The 16th annual Winter X Games are scheduled to begin Thursday.

"She passed doing the greatest thing that she loved to do," Dillon said. "Although it's never easy, that's a gift."

via: usatoday