“It’s the difference between falling on the pavement and falling on grass,” says Madeleine Orr, one of the report’s authors and an assistant professor of sport ecology at the University of Toronto in Canada and formerly at Loughborough, whose research focuses on how climate change impacts sport. She says she has noticed trends in the data on injury rates. “People aren’t falling more on artificial snow, but when they do fall, it’s a harder surface, and therefore there is a higher risk of injury.”<\/p>\n
In the 2022 report, athletes and coaches expressed concern about the increase in injuries and the impact climate change is having on training and competitive events.<\/p>\n
When “freestyle super pipes are formed from snow-making machines in a poor [natural snow] season, the walls of the pipe are solid, vertical ice and the pipe floor is solid ice,” says Laura Donaldson, a Scottish freestyle skier, who competed at the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics. “This is dangerous for athletes, some have died.”\u00a0<\/p>\n
However not all athletes feel artificial snow use is a significant change. “As athletes we’re pretty used to training and racing in all sorts of environments, so artificial snow is just another part of that,” says Fitzpatrick. “I grew up skiing on indoor slopes in Britain, so it’s never really felt out of the ordinary for me,” she adds.<\/p>\n
“Ski racing will always come with risks, and that’s something we all accept,” she says. “Injuries are part of the sport, and while we work hard to reduce the risks, there are so many variables that I don’t see artificial snow as a key issue.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"“It’s the difference between falling on the pavement and falling on grass,” says Madeleine Orr, one of the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":278865,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[85,46,105],"class_list":{"0":"post-278864","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-sports","8":"tag-il","9":"tag-israel","10":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/278864","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=278864"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/278864\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/278865"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=278864"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=278864"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=278864"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}