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Comment by gnramires | Hacker News Reader

This seems totally unacceptable. We should stop having this sport in the Olympics (implicitly supporting this madness) -- of course athletes are free to do as they chose, but we cannot encourage such pointless self-destruction and misery.

An alternative to save the sport is completely redesign it to limit maximum accelerations. Usually injuries follow power laws so I doubt even that much reduction would be necessary (shed maximum accel to 1/3 current and I bet lifetime injuries could become acceptable). Mandatory equipment changes would probably help as well.

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I think the Olympics is just generally physically bad for the athletes. Runners, weightlifters, wrestlers, boxers, rowers, etc all these folks end up working so close o the edge of sustainable human tolerance and capacity that’s it’s unlikely they are not constantly going over it.

Isn't that the whole point of the Olympics though? To push humans to the limit.

Nit: To have humans push themselves to the limit.

I don't understand this comment; what is physically bad about running? I'll accept that you may have a higher rate of injuries but surely we can agree that pulling a muscle and giving yourself Parkinson's are not remotely in the same ballpark of injuries.

Knee implants, significant negative hormonal changes for men over 50 miles/wk. Repetitive stress injuries are no joke.

OP is probably not aware that the Olympics does not have ultra-marathon type events which are generally very unhealthy for participants, only a 10K and a marathon (and shorter sprints of course)

WRT knee damage, I found a Harvard report saying that running helps protect your knees against arthritis [0]. You'll have to source your own hormonal claim because it was too vague for me to find much, but what I did find did not seem negative [1][2].

[0] https://www.health.harvard.edu/healthbeat/will-continuing-to...

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19046725/

[2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18208421/

You're talking about regular running, not trying to literally be the best runner in the world. Completely different.

That first link is just a Q/A. There is no study or report linked.

Almost all studies use untrained vs trained athletes. They rarely qualified what "trained" means and could be anything from a lifetime athlete to someone who self-reported following a 6 week plan prior to the study and now we consider this person "trained". Most athletic studies are used to compare a sedentary person to someone who workouts casually (less than about 10 hours per week). Once you pass this point, you're in diminishing returns territory and you've got to actively sacrifice some parts of your overall health to make gains in a single activity (sprinting, jumping, etc.).

So will running a few times a week help fight mild arthritis? Probably. Will training like an Olympic athlete? No. Same thing applies to the OP article. Will sledding down a hill give you brain damage? No. Will constantly sledding at Olympic athlete speeds and g-forces? Seems like it.

How do you know all that? There is no scientific consensus that exercising over 10 ours per week sacrifices your overall health.

Yeah, you definitely have to sacrifice parts of your overall health if you want to exercise more than 90 minutes per day.

Diminishing returns doesn't mean that you have to sacrifice anything (besides some idealized notion of efficiency). The hurt-your-overall-health point is somewhere much closer to Olympic athlete than it is to 10hrs/week. If you just vary the activities a little, you will have no trouble with spending a lot more time on exercise. People who literally do only the one physical activity they compete in are straw men.

PS: The number of people completely clueless about fitness on HN would be hilarious if it weren't so sad.

Working out (not including warmup/cooldown) for 90 min, 7 days per week is insane and you will be less healthy. No rest day means you'll be over trained in less than two weeks, and your workouts will get worse over time. Not only that you'll probably get injured within a month.

Let's say you create a sane schedule of 3 days on, 1 day off (or similar) and you workout 2 hours per day (20 hours in 2 weeks) and let's assume you're sleeping the necessary 10 hours per day for this training schedule. And we'll make the very generous assumption you manage to not get injured for an extended period of time. You're still at higher risk of infections due to suppressed immune system[1] and also at a certain FFMI, your cardiovascular health actually starts to decrease[2]. Plus the chances that your nutrition, mobility, sleep schedule, and training plan are all good enough to not get you injured or sick during training, are astronomically low.

I only workout 60-75 minutes 5 days/week and I'm already at or above the FFMI level where my heart health is worse than if I just stuck to moderate intensity exercise for less time.

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19336500/ [2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00256...

Huh, seems I read "workout" as "generic exercise" in your previous post, but I guess you meant high intensity stuff exclusively. I'm pretty sure most athletes have stuff to do that doesn't really have this sort of limit -- like cardio or technical work.

Runners experience the same immune suppression effects as people who train HIIT: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8164529/

Interesting.

The thinking behind my post was that if you add up training (for the activity they compete in) and all the other physical activities people do, the differences in training volume will be dominated by the other differences -- consider people with jobs that involve manual labor, or, to a lesser extent, bike commuters. Perhaps this was controlled for in the studies?

The other thing I had in mind was people whose sports involve lots of different movements one can practice -- say, ice hockey. I have no idea whether ice hockey shooting practice counts as high intensity... but it's not nothing, and doesn't seem much like ultra running either.

> Knee implants

Source? I would expect these are much more common in obese people than in habitual runners. My understanding is that runners have been found to have healthy knees, e.g. with a bit of googling I find [1][2] (but haven't read them).

> significant negative hormonal changes for men over 50 miles/wk

They have found somewhat lower testosterone levels, but I don't know of any study finding negative health impacts. Do you have a source for "significant negative"?

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5179322/ [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2556152/

With things like running, rowing, and weightlifting you aren't at a significant risk of brain injury though. I would much rather have damaged joints than a damaged brain. And for these sledding athletes, it sounds like this damage is constant and inevitable even if you do everything perfectly, rather than a result of accidents like with sports like snowboarding and skiing.

Injury risk can be counterintuitive, like how synchronized swimmers pretty much universally suffer from concussions [0]

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetorch/2016/08/16/490074935/t...

Weight cutting is pretty bad for your body, and they take it to extreme levels of drying out their bodies too, so any of these sports which have weight classes (all the weight lifting, wrestling) are pretty damaging to all organs in the body and have caused death before. Not advocating to stop these in Olympics, pointing out there's non-obvious risks athletes take beside head trauma.

Not to the degree that there is a pattern of them committing suicide before 50. This sport seems particularly pernicious because it's a slow accumulated brain injury and because the sport normalises concussion which is taken very seriously in other sports.

I find it extremely weird when people complain that athletes should stop their sport because "it's bad for them". So is office work. 8 hours of sitting, back pain and the repetitive stress on hands causing arthritis issues isn't that much better. I'd say it's just as physically bad for people, except office work is a life unfulfilled and boring. Office work isn't exactly something you can brag about. I'd rather have bad knees being a competitive runner than having bad knees because I sit too much.

There's inherent risk in simply living. If people want to have fulfilled lives by pushing their body's to the limit, that's their choice and to be honest, a choice we should all be encouraged to try in our lives to some capacity. Also, to pretend they're unaware of the risk is ridiculous. It's not like the Olympics is the only competitive arena for these disciplines.

Agreed, we should not sympathize on behalf of them where they're free to choose to do something else if they wanted. This is a concious choice and it is in the same vein as people would support legalization of recreational drugs - let people make their own decisions.

Wanna rock climb and take the risk? We should allow it just like we allow sky diving, climbing the Everest and sailing.

This kind of thinking leads to degradation of the society where no one will be allowed to take risks.

> Wanna rock climb and take the risk? We should allow it

That's different from broadcasting a free soloing climbing tournament across the world, and giving rewards to the winners (survivors)

"Allowing" need not meen "encouraging"

Fair enough, that's an important distinction and I concede. I think it makes sense to prevent glorifying deadly sports and still allow them to be conducted.

So, ban all competitions in general? That sounds like a fantastic idea... gonna solve lots of problems with that one.

Football, both kinds, have lots of permanent injuries throughout the body and brain. If you want to talk about rewarding people for pushing themselves to the extreme, those are far better examples than free soloing.

It's interesting when people are fine with stopping passion sports like climbing, skateboarding and now sledding, but they're too scared to say the same about the 800-pound guerrilla, money making machine sports with a lot more TBIs and deaths. Especially since a lot of people go for football more for the reward than for the actual passion.

Again, it's not like anyone participating in any of these sports are unaware of the risk. An argument might exist for 20-30 years ago. But not today. That takes flat-earther mental gymnastics to think they aren't putting themselves at risk. But at the end, if you're complaining that, "These people push their body's too far", that's not you caring about their well being. That's you seeing your own weakness, laziness and cowardliness to attempt the same feat. These folks are going to push themselves some way, some how, because they want to not die wondering "what if". No one is ever safe from "mental demons" and it's terrible when someone takes their own life, no matter what the category root cause was. But I know very well that choosing to achieve nothing due to fear is a bigger open door for those issues.

> So, ban all competitions

I wrote "not encouraging", that's different from "ban all". Why did you reply to "ban all" instead?

I like MMA and UFC, however, the fighters get brain scanned to find out about underlying problems, and if you get knocked out, you cannot compete again for a long while (because of TBI risk).

Whilst the sledding sports seem to ignore brain injuries.

> [office chair back pain, finger injuries] isn't that much better

But this generally doesn't case suicide

And can be treated, by going to the gym. (I had back, knee, elbow pain myself, from office work — and the gym, made it disappear. In my particular case)

> bad knees

Agreed, I'd be ok with bad knees.

But when it's the brain, it's ... to some extent, the end.

That's true, but I don't think GP was referring to those special cases where the risk is to the brain, even though those are the what the linked article of course discusses.

As their parent comment said, any sport that compels you to reach for the extremes of physical human performance carries a risk of injury and wear that's obviously greater than just exercising for health and casual fitness. In most cases that's to something else in your body than your brain.

But that reaching for the limits is also what makes those sports enjoyable to some people, and nothing else might quite equal the experience.

Pointing out how it damages body should be as acceptable as pointing out too much sugar is bad for you. There is absolutely nothing weird about saying so. And also, office work is less damaging to body then top sport.

Second, general public knowing that top sport damages body influences parents, teachers and coaches decisions. When we make that topic taboo, people are more likely to push kids toward maximum performance in sport. To teach them set of values that pushes it.

When we know serious clubs can damage them, we are more likely to pick less serious clubs (which prevents future top engagement).

It would not be the first Olympic sport redesigned for safety concerns.

The first one that I am aware of is Javelin. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Javelin_throw#Javelin_redesign... for more.

That case though was about safety of the audience, says the article.

True, but nevertheless it shows that it can be done.

Formula 1 and motor racing in general is a prime example for that as well. Formula 1 has a strict set of rules that makes sure the speed and cornering speeds aren't going through the roof because of deadly accidents in the past.

The same could be done for sledding. Reduce speed by limiting what is technically allowed and improve protection of the athletes. From reading the article i could imagine that a headrest with a dampening foam is added to the sledge and prevent the helmet from touching the ice. Or add role bars to the sledge that protects the athletes from injuries during a crash. Or a emergency brake that stops the sledge from sliding all the way to the end after a crash. There are many more things that i can imagine. If it all makes sense has to be evaluated. But first the political will to change something has to be there. And i think that's the difference between formula 1 and sledding. In one sport there was instant death of the athletes and in the other the athletes deteriorated over time.

Instead of or in addition to all that, wouldn't you just make the course less steep?

Sure that would work as well. But i imagine that to be much more expensive then adding some requirements to the sledge that increases drag or increases the sliding friction

There are many instances of redesign due to safety concerns. The clean and press was removed from weightlifting because it was very bad for the back. Some judo throws (such as ones that twisted the knee) where also removed for safety reasons.

>pointless self-destruction and misery.

Maybe its pointless for you, fair enough but it can be meaningfull for other people, i myself think it's interesting.

matz should not be downvoted. Humans do lots of objectively pointless self-destruction like things as a hobby with increasing risks. Things like human powered flight, aerogliding and sky diving, parkour, climbing steep things with and without gear, driving at high speeds around bends, 'explore' the wild, many of which we celebrate, reward and encourage.

Well said.

Depending on people's level of courage, or lackthereof, all sports might seem like pointless self-destruction and misery. Heck, even basketball or ice curling.

Heck, I would never in my right-mind try grinding a rail on a skateboard after seeing some kid break his leg on a bad landing.

But just cause it looks insane to me doesn't mean it has no value or merit.

Not to mention that it makes a fun video game on the PS2.

I recommend the YouTube rabbit hole of Alex Honnold interviews, whenever he talks about risk it's interesting.

honnold may be a special case. his capabilities of dealing with risk and fear are exceptional.

Why is he a special case. There are hundreds if not 1000s of people that want to be risk takers for no other reason then the risk its self

You're right. Just visit GoPros youtube channel. There's no shortage of adrenaline seekers.

I'd say it's partly that, but more a case of survivorship bias; we don't hear from other solo free climbers because most of them are dead.

citation needed

Edit: It's not like these climbers never climb with gear. That is, they don't have to confront the learning curve and fatal consequences at the same time. They can also learn safely via bouldering, climbing above water and such.

Yes, that's sort of why I recommended his interviews, because he's given it a lot of thought and has interesting things to say about risk (I imagine even if he initially didn't think a ton about it, people constantly asking has given him some good answers) in addition to the explanation that these climbs are prepared for in advance.

He has a unique perspective, I've heard on a couple occasions him talking about his father dropping dead of a heart attack changing planes. I can't find the exact video or I'd link it, but he's clearly thought a lot about risk and is pretty interesting to listen to even if you're not enamored with his exploits.

But that's no reason to make it an Olympic sport, thus encouraging people to take more risks.

When the sport is on Olympic and we encourage people to push themselves to maximum or encourage kids to pick it up, then it is not anymore about individual feeling from risk.

It is risk taken to earn.

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/one-mans...

>Many have poured scorn on Curry’s venture, particularly since it doesn’t have a charitable component. “This is the most pathetic waste of man hours that could have been used for good that I’ve seen in a long time,” one typical YouTube comment says. On the forum where he first heard about Dick Tree’s idea, Curry posted a spirited, if nihilistic, rebuttal. “To say that our lives are pointless and our achievements meaningless is to state the obvious,” he wrote. “No matter how grand our achievements or how broad their scope, time turns all to dust and death destroys all memory. But that does not mean we cannot ascribe our own meaning to what we do.”

This argument was had when Jackie Stewart campaigned to make Formula 1 safe. Fortunately he prevailed, but there were plenty of people - even other drivers - arguing that the danger was an intrinsic part of the sport.

Just look how much safer racing has become since it's inception. And also at the same time, the sport has become magnitudes faster. There's no reason we can't have faster, more exciting, and safer all at the same time. It's just another challenge to the sport.

If it were meaningful for the athletes, they would not be taking their own lives after clearly struggling in complete misery for years; clearly even endangering lives of loved ones. You can tell most just don't understand what they signed up for.

In any case, we're rewarding and glorifying this activity. It's not just there, of course people are free to do as they please. We're making them go through this sacrifice (that clearly leaves great damage) for a reward of glory, fame or just money. If you give gold medals for it, no matter how pointless, unfulfilling and destructive it is, someone will do it. It's our responsibility.

When there are really beautiful sports out there, that players really clearly enjoy, and which are reasonably healthy (of course to an extent every activity has risks), there's simply no excuse.

So funny thing about unacceptable and lateral g-force — this is a big part of why F1 cars aren’t V10 engines anymore. They were getting too fast and the decision was between g-suits and slower cars. FIA chose slower cars (also more fuel efficient, yay).

Now it’s a few years later and cars have again advanced to the point that drivers pull more than 5 lateral G in some corners. It’s kinda bonkers.

I wonder if something like the HANS device could be useful in sledding. Or those neck protectors motocross riders use. Might keep heads from banging around as much.

Do you have a source on the reason for moving away from V10s being about safety of drivers. It was, I thought, about cost reduction and image (move towards less gas guzzling monsters and then hybrid that we have today)

https://web.archive.org/web/20070428004836/http://www.formul...

"For 2006, engines are reduced in size from the previous 3-litre V10s to 2.4-litre V8s. The aim is to reduce costs and improve safety."

You can also tell that it's mostly about performance, given all the other design restrictions (no variable valve timing, no intercoolers, just one spark plug, etc ).

I was told that engines were more stable in multiples of 6's from some weird physics going on in the engine. I guess that guy could have been completely full of shit.

That guy was right that there are 6-cylinder configurations with perfect mechanical balance (and not for other cylinder numbers), but the V6 isn't one of them so that's not the reason here.

Its mostly a trigonometry thing, three sine waves 120 degrees out of phase balance out to constant torque. Also see electrical 3-phase power.

Note that internal combustion cylinder pressure is by no means a perfect sine wave LOL but its a close enough approximation to run smoother.

Its partially a physics thing, in that ICE are usually 4-cycle so they fire every other rotation so if you want three firing pistons per rotation separated 120 degrees you'll need six cylinders total.

>electrical 3-phase power.

Thank you for that! Interesting read.

And to think that the sport that actually did Schumacher in was skiing - something millions of people do casually every weekend.

My point is that while there has to be a thrust on safety, even the mundane can be unsafe enough; you can't overstress safety

where i live (especially in my local region) tourism is huge. especially in winter. and IMHO skiing is one of the most dangerous winter activities you can do. i honestly always bring this up because i think skiing is wrongfully seen as a "casual activity".

having worked in a hospital for some time, you wouldn't believe how many accidents we receive in winter just because of skiing accidents. it's by far the worst time to be working in a hospital and i'm not exaggerating. it's truly insane how easy it is to get injured in a major way while skiing.

you can be the best freaking skiier in your whole ski club, and still get taken out by a single stupid idiot who doesn't know his limits or just doesn't care for the safety of others.

The thing about skiing (and snowboarding) is that improving measurable performance almost always requires taking more risks - harder trails or higher speed. Contrast with running, for example, where increasing speed involves no risk at all. Most people want to improve at what they do, so the ski resorts are filled with people at the edge of their ability, all in proximity to one another. That plus the sheer speed practically guarantees a high injury rate.

Personally, while I do challenge myself in those ways some of the time, I'm just as happy seeing how many turns I can make on a run I've already mastered, or trying to make each turn absolutely perfect. Slight increase in risk, but much less than the human cannonballs I see around me.

i agree, you're never going to be able to ski down a black-level route if you don't take the very first risk: going from blue-level to red-level. but with my prev comment i hope to kind of shed light on how dangerous skiing actually is as i often hear people having very relaxed opinions on skiing so i just feel obligated to share my experience lol

so to lead back to the original comment, i don't think it's ironic at all that Schuhmacher had his accident while skiing instead of driving F1. i consider skiing much more dangerous. however do take that opinion with a grain of salt. i'm not into F1, have never driven a F1 car, never watched a full race and don't know the statistics about average injury rates of F1 drivers. but i do know that the mountains are full of idiots going high speed, which isn't even required to get a high level injury. while on the race track, you drive against other professionals.

I feel like we should demonetize competitive sports. Sports are wonderful, but money (and maybe fame) incentivizes you past the point where you stop based on how your body feels.

Maybe we miss out on records and storylines, but I think there are much healthier ways of spending our time.

None of these guys were getting paid to be bobsledders. I suppose they get endorsements and such, but they didn't become millionaires based on a salary alone.

US olympians earn an average of $16,000/year, mostly from part-time jobs that give them extra time to train. If they win gold, they get $40,000 per medal (meaning teams have to split it). Olympians are definitely not in it for the money.

> Usually injuries follow power laws

That's a pretty outstanding claim, do you have any evidence for this?

I'd bet a case of beer that OP did operations analysis in his MBA course... The term to google for is "Duane Power Law" or similar. Duane was the first statistical process improvement researcher in the 60s to graph MTBF stats and discover breakdowns follow a power law. There's a lot to see if you google for that.

Of course humans aren't machines... or are we? Pretty weird how wildly different factory floor industrial machinery all follow the same power law. I would be surprised if humans did NOT follow some kind of power law of injuries based on total cumulative energy dissipation in tissue over time or something like that. Humans can heal better than a milling machine or EDM cutter. On the other hand humans take terrible repetitive strain damage, so maybe Duane is right after all.

> would be surprised if humans did NOT follow some kind of power law of injuries based on total cumulative energy dissipation in tissue over time or something like that.

Only if the injury is related to velocity. If it's related to mass, you'd expect linear scaling.

KE = 0.5(M(V^2))

Kinetic Energy is linearly related to Mass and is geometrically related to Velocity.

How about we let people decide on their won what they want to do with their lives?

Generally I'd agree, but there is some rationality to the idea that we should not encourage and promote certain activities because of their inherent dangers. Smoking, for instance.

There is a distinction here that needs to be emphasized. We should absolutely allow people to smoke: what we should limit is the amount of money that goes into marketing, promotion, the big Philip Morris, government lobbying, and a whole bunch of backend work that goes into getting people addicted to Tobacco.

Simply restricting people from smoking is a blanket encroachment of personal liberty and should not be IMO entertained. As far as it doesn't damage others (like Guns), we should allow it.

I think warning labels on Cigarette boxes is an excellent idea - it informs the consumer of facts of consuming the product, whether they choose to do it or not is up to them.

_any_ sport at a high enough level will be bad for your body.

No, sport is dangerous and we must accept this. Otherwise this is a slippery slope and will result in banning sinple things like a slide in soccer or something.

That's nonsense. We can assess risks and determine the probability of injuries and the severity of them, and issue bans accordingly. "If we ban X then W, Y and Z are next" is just fearmongering. There's no reason why we can't ban something without banning other things that are much less dangerous.

Most "slippery slope" arguments are so obviously fallacious I'm surprised people still try to use them.

Horseback riding Is super dangerous

Lots of activities are dangerous. The main problem is that danger is a function of probability (eg how likely are you to get hurt doing that thing), and people are terrible at estimating probability. While horse riding is dangerous in the sense that when you get hurt it's likely to be severe, it's not that dangerous because the probability of being hurt is quite low. Among the millions of people who go horse riding each year very few get badly hurt. What the article is suggesting is for the relatively small number of people who participate in bobsledding a significant number are getting brain injuries.

With google its quite trivial to get actual data rather than estimates.

It doesn't seem controversial that per IIHS stats motorcycles have about 30 times more fatalities per 100K miles than cars.

Likewise I have no reason to disagree with an online Br J Sp Med journal article from '91 that horse riders experience significant accidents once every 350 hours whereas motorcyclists have a serious accident every 7000 hours, or about 20 times more risky, based on ER reports.

So multiplying risk, it seems horse riding is about 600 times more dangerous than passenger car driving.

Another interesting anecdote is "everyone knows" that most accidents happen to noobs because they're distracted so much by learning and not knowing their limitations. So what you're really measuring is the fraction of low time noobs who will be injured by the sport before they escape noob status. That hypothesis would predict that essentially all horse riders will be injured in some way before they escape noob status, a noticeable fraction of motorcycle riders will be injured as noobs although the vast majority will not be injured, and its actually VERY rare for a noob car driver to be injured while learning to drive. In summary, this seems to be a situation where perceived risk matches actual risk.

It would seem as a civilization we do an adequate job preparing teen car drivers as the vast majority of drivers survive their teen driver years, but as a civilization we do a completely inadequate job training horse riders. Or at least based on British data from the 80s as reported thirty years ago; I'm old enough to remember nobody wore bicycle helmets before the 90s; perhaps modern horse rider trainees wear better safety equipment in 2020 than in 1990.

Strange start up tech idea: Smart helmet with GPS and machine vision for horse riders with AI and machine learning to yell in their ear when they're doing something dumb. If essentially all horse riders are injured while learning, they would likely be very motivated to drop some money on your smart AI safety helmet. On the other hand actual risk data indicates a similar product for teen drivers simply wouldn't sell, not having the proposed theoretical magic helm already has a very low accident rate making the helm appear less useful. Edited to note: that's the entire point of my risk rant, do a startup on fixing a problem virtually all of the customers have, not a startup on a problem essentially none of the customers have.

Equestrians are the anti-gymnasts, being among the oldest olympians. Consider Ian Millar's 10 olympic appearances.

(The longer one does it, the safer it gets. A local hospital's emergency room statistics showed the first 200 hours are the most dangerous, declining thereafter.)

The current environment is already a chosen position on a slope. Gymnastics and figure skating have illegal moves. All sports ban some drugs due to their adverse health consequences.

What is considered too dangerous is a constant conversation and continually revised. Your position that we should stand at the top of the slope (allow unbounded danger in sport) is something that most of society feel is extreme.

Near the top of the slope: "open" sports divisions, allowing unlimited doping. Prizes awarded after six months, to any remaining contestants who still pass medical checkup.

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