The main issue illustrated by this story is that the warm weather in Sochi is causing many of the venues to be built sloppily or incorrectly. In this case the slopestyle venue was difficult to build because of poor snow quality and the jumps are all massively overbuilt to try to compensate for high expected melting rates over the coming week.
When I am concerned about safety, I do mean safety of the athletes, but I don't mean jumps being too big. I'm more concerned about poor fencing, inconsistent terrain, etc. A pedestrian pathway fell down just before the Commonwealth Games in India a few years ago. Those are the types of safety concerns I was worried about.
As far as 'big jumps' go, I figure, if you're a professional athlete and your sport involves jumps, you need to know what speed you can safely take those jumps at.
Contrast that to the tragic Skeleton accident on the first day of the Whistler Olympics. Everybody had said how challenging the track was, but nobody imagined anybody would fly off the track and hit a pole. The challenging track is acceptable, the pole is absolutely not. There was nothing the athlete could have done to protect himself once he came off the course.
I don't know that the snowboard cross comparisons is that kind of dangerous.
I certainly don't think that the snowboard cross course as reported so far is dangerous in a deadly way like an alpine course with flawed fencing design or a skeleton or bobsled course with solid obstacles in proximity, but the reasons that the snowboard cross course are bad are still very worrying.
Based on what athletes said for example here: http://www.ctvnews.ca/sochi/safety-concerns-over-sochi-slope... , the snowboard cross isn't huge because the builders wanted to go big by design, but rather to anticipate extreme melting activity. And, like the Whistler courses, the slopestyle course was supposed to have been tested a year ago but was unable to be constructed due to a lack of snow.
I certainly don't think it's a good sign.
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