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Comment by throwawayhelmet | Hacker News Reader

Okay, true story. Years ago I struggled with this exact logic regarding skiing with helmet. After serious consideration I decided to start skiing so carefully that I do not need a helmet. As you may guess at this point, The very first day I left my helmet home, I got into an accident and got a skull fracture.

I started using my helmet again after that.

(But another safety related thing I have started to really doubt. Skiing alone is supposed to be risky. I do ski alone, quite a lot actually. I have gotten into my share of accidents of various seriousness. And not a single of them has been when I have been alone.)

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I have the exact opposite experience.

My first time ever wearing a helmet on the slopes I slammed head-first into a tree. Got up, laughed it off, and rode away. Better lucky than good.

My old boss was an experienced skier on an organised cross country ski tour and got killed by an avalanche. It was in a low avalanche risk area with no avalanches forecast, and he was wearing all safety equipment, including one of those balloons. Medical help was almost immediate and nobody else on the tour was seriously injured.

Sometimes the universe just wants you dead.

The fact is that experienced back country skiers are more likely to die in an avalanche.

Part of this is complacency, but honestly most of it is just probability. The more you do something, the more chances you have for just the wrong combination of factors to happen.

I suspect skiing was invented to cull the clumsy (and the simply unlucky) from the ranks of the rich.

There was already Polo for that.

Well, you would need something when it's too cold for polo.

I had this exact talk with my rich buddy in high school once 15 years ago :) . He was heading for a ski trip that my family couldn't have afforded in my wildest dreams.

I have a ski helmet at home with a big crack in it. My daughter was wearing it. She's a cautious skier with a lot of training.

Michael Schumacher would disagree.

Are you one of the guys who doesn't wear a seat belt due to 1 in a million chance that it might actually not help you?

Michael Schumacher had a GoPro on his helmet that punched through.

I've never skied with a helmet. Ridiculous. The only thing you can do about the risk of hitting or being hit, is stay home.

In German speaking countries we went from 15% to 3% of the ski accidents with hospitalization being related to head injuries, this within the past 15/20 years.

This correlates very well with the increase of helmet usage.

Do you happen to know the overall change in accidents? That's the big question behind the motivation for this change. There's no doubt that helmets would reduce the percent of all accidents that are head related, but does some reduced concern about safety result in more accidents overall?

From the biggest Ski insurance/interest group in Germany (the ones from the Ski federation), the stats show a 50% decrease since the 80's.[0]

The trend is stable/slight increase in the past 5 years.

For the head injuries, it reduced from 2/1000 skier to about 1/1000 skier/year. It follows the general trend of the number of accidents per skier/year.

Looking at the material and the quality of the slopes in the past 40 years, they are definitely a big driver of this change, they improved a lot!

[0]: https://www.stiftung.ski/sis-lab/asu-unfallanalyse/

I have never had a serious accident but started wearing a helmet. I don't think there's a large risk either way because I don't do a lot of tree skiing. But I wouldn't call it ridiculous. No more so than wearing a bike helmet.

Imagine applying this same non-logic to car seat belts, motorcycle helmets, rock climbing harnesses, et multa alia. If you don't want to wear a helmet, that's fine, but don't bother trying to justify it with anything other than "I don't want to", because you really can't.

Even strong and careful skiers wipe out occasionally. A helmet is the difference between shaking it off and brain injury.

I've skied in Austria for the past 15 years and never wore a helmet for the first 8 years. I now have my own helmet. And I made sure it even has MIPS.

You can be as cautious as you want and never make a mistake, but if someone else skies into you you could still smash your head very hard. That's why you should wear a helmet. Not because of your own capabilities, but because of the capabilities of the people around you and the risk just being too high.

I wouldn't wear a helmet while cycling though. It's quite safe in The Netherlands.

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