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It’s normally not till December or January and after a collection of tumbles, twisted knees, torn ACLs and worse that the controversy over security in World Cup snowboarding turns into an annual subject.
Not this season.
Beneficial Tales
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The demise of Italian skier Matteo Franzoso this week following a crash in preseason coaching in Chile has resurfaced issues over the best way to restrict dangers within the high-speed sport greater than a month earlier than the racing even begins.
The controversy additionally comes lower than 5 months earlier than the Milan-Cortina Olympics.
Franzoso, who was 25, grew to become the third rising Italian skier to die in lower than a 12 months.
Matilde Lorenzi, who was 19, died from her accidents after a crash final October. Then in March, Marco Degli Uomini, who was 18, died whereas testing the course for a regional kids’s race. A month later, Margot Simond, who was a promising 18-year-old French skier, died in a coaching crash, too.
In 2017, French downhill skier David Poisson, a former medallist on the world championships, died following a coaching crash in Canada. He was 35.
“What number of tragic losses will we’ve got to expertise earlier than we lastly open the controversy on security, particularly throughout coaching?” veteran French downhiller Adrien Theaux wrote on Instagram.
Added Lucrezia Lorenzi, Matilde’s older sister and a aggressive skier herself: “The time has come to cease … You’ll be able to’t exit to ski after which not return house.”
Franzoso crashed by two layers of security fencing on a course at La Parva and slammed into one other sort of fence positioned six to seven meters (20-23 toes) outdoors the course, the Italian Winter Sports activities Federation mentioned. He was transported by helicopter to a hospital in Santiago, however couldn’t survive cranial trauma and a consequent swelling of his mind. He died two days later — a day earlier than what would have been his twenty sixth birthday.
The La Parva course has been broadly utilized by World Cup skiers for years. Lindsey Vonn and the US Ski Crew have been coaching there per week earlier than Franzoso’s crash and several other different nationwide groups have been there this month.
Italian veteran Christof Innerhofer had accomplished a run simply earlier than Franzoso’s crash and heard in regards to the crash. Then Innerhofer noticed the crash web site along with his personal eyes when he went again up on a chairlift and regarded down at his fallen teammate.
“Matte, once I noticed the place you fell, the place they have been making use of emergency help, with you on the opposite facet of the fence, I misplaced my thoughts as a result of I feared for the severity of the scenario,” Innerhofer wrote on Instagram.
The 40-year-old Innerhofer was so shaken that he deserted the coaching camp and flew house to Italy: “These are the hardest days I’ve ever skilled as an athlete,” he mentioned.
Franzoso’s demise has sparked debate over whether or not the Switzerland-based Worldwide Ski and Snowboard Federation (FIS) ought to tackle a larger function in guaranteeing security for preseason coaching programs within the Southern Hemisphere.
Ushuaia in Argentina and Coronet Peak in New Zealand are additionally well-liked locations for World Cup skiers in August and September.
The Italian federation held an pressing assembly Friday and known as for the FIS to ascertain devoted coaching programs for nationwide groups.
“The proposal may embody two programs within the Southern Hemisphere for summer season coaching, and some programs in Europe and North America for fall and winter coaching,” the Italian federation, often known as FISI, mentioned.
FISI added that the coaching programs ought to have A, B and C security netting similar to programs used for World Cup races.
“Within the coming weeks, FIS will additional intensify dialogue with its stakeholders, at all times with a single tenet: the wellbeing and security of athletes should come first,” the FIS mentioned in a press release Friday.
Beginning this season, all World Cup skiers can be required to put on protecting air-bag methods beneath their racing fits for downhill and super-G races; and cut-resistant underwear for all occasions.
The air baggage, which inflate briefly when activated by a complicated algorithm that may sense when a skier loses management, have been round as an non-compulsory security machine for years.
The cut-resistant underwear protects in opposition to laceration accidents from ultra-sharp ski edges. For instance, the underwear could have helped stop the extreme minimize and nerve harm to the suitable calf of Norwegian standout Aleksander Aamodt Kilde throughout a horrific crash in January 2024. Kilde has been out ever since that fall however hopes to return this season.
“Moments like this convey into sharp focus the profound dangers which might be an inseparable a part of our sport,” the FIS mentioned. “It isn’t doable to eradicate the inherent risks of alpine snowboarding, however — by listening, by elevating consciousness, and by fostering dialogue that results in collective motion — we will mitigate the dangers.”
Franzoso was from the coastal metropolis of Genoa however had moved to the mountains close to Sestriere to pursue his snowboarding profession. His funeral can be held on Tuesday in Sestriere — the place snowboarding was contested on the 2006 Turin Olympics.
For the Milan-Cortina Video games in February, males’s snowboarding can be held in Bormio and ladies’s snowboarding can be held in Cortina d’Ampezzo.
Each the Stelvio course in Bormio and the Olympia delle Tofane course in Cortina have been the positioning of quite a few high-profile crashes lately. Mikaela Shiffrin hit the Cortina nets at excessive pace in 2024, and French standout Cyprien Sarrazin wanted surgical procedure to empty mind bleeding after he was catapulted into the air and landed exhausting on the Stelvio final season.
This season’s World Cup circuit opens on the Rettenbach glacier in Solden, Austria, on the finish of October.
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