A British skier crashes through a wooden fence on a downhill bend and crashes into a pole, breaking his leg. An American hits a patch of ice at the bottom of a hill and crashes into a fence, breaking one ski and twisting the other, also breaking his leg.
Another American, training before a biathlon race, slips on an icy bend and flies off the track into a tree, breaking ribs and a shoulder blade and puncturing a lung.
These weren’t scenes of high-speed ski cross or alpine racing. They took place on cross-country ski and biathlon tracks in artificial snow.
Many top Nordic skiers and biathletes say such accidents are becoming more common as climate change reduces the availability of natural snow, forcing riders to compete on slopes with the machine-made version. Organizers of Olympic and World Cup races have come to rely on snowmaking equipment to create a white ribbon across the hills, as natural snowfall is less reliable.
Johanna Taliharm, an Olympic biathlete from Estonia, said running on artificial snow is risky.
“Artificial snow is more icy, therefore faster and more dangerous,” she said. “It also hurts more if you fall off course when there’s no fluffy snowbank but rocky, muddy hard ground.”
Machine-made snow has a higher moisture content, causing it to freeze quickly, skiers and experts say.
“It can be very hard out there, and falling down can feel like falling on concrete, which makes it a bit more dangerous than if it were natural snow conditions,” said Chris Grover, head cross-country coach for the United States Ski Team.
Some sites even make snow, then store it under wood chips during the summer and spread it around a track when it’s cold. Artificial snow, welcome as it is, does not improve with age. Race organizers should take this into account when designing courses, say skiers and experts.
“It’s pretty universally recognized that the courses are firmer and faster than before,” said Gus Schumacher, a member of the US cross-country team. At a race in France, “there were a few crashes where people slipped on the icy corners because the snow is super unforgiving. Like, they’re really sharp crystals that don’t bond together very well.
John Aalberg, a former Olympic cross-country skier who designs Olympic Nordic skiing courses, including for the Beijing Games, said they always consider ice conditions when designing a course. He said a bigger safety issue was the change in race formats from single starts to mass start races.
“When you ski one at a time like they did in the 90s, you could have gnarlier descents and turns because they came one at a time,” he said. “What is important in terms of safety is that the downhill corners are not too tight in terms of width.”
Unlike alpine equipment, cross-country skis do not have metal edges. They are designed to be thin and light for climbing hills and sliding on flat terrain. The boots are flexible and connect to the ski with a single metal bar under the toe. Nordic skiers do not use the edge of the ski to navigate a turn. Instead, they take small, quick steps around the curve.
All of this is more difficult on artificial snow.
“We’re going really fast downhill,” said Jessie Diggins, an Olympic gold medalist and member of the US Nordic Ski Team. “I’ve reached up to 76 kilometers per hour (47 mph) downhill on artificial snow, and that’s scary because most of our race tracks are built for natural snow, which is a little softer. You have a little more padding on the side of the trail where you have snow banks, not just falls.
“I think it gets a bit more dangerous and I noticed at the World Cup when it’s artificial snow, it’s scary because instead of sliding on snow, you slide on ice” , added Diggins, who was the overall World Cup winner for the 2020-21 season. “I think we are seeing a higher percentage of falls. I think it’s a little more dangerous now.
The International Ski Federation, which oversees ski racing worldwide, has been tracking injuries since 2006. The FIS Surveillance System was created to “monitor injury patterns and trends across the various FIS disciplines” and to “ provide basic data for in-depth studies of the causes of injuries.
The reports track alpine skiing, freestyle skiing, snowboarding and ski jumping. But there are no injury data in Nordic events, which include cross-country skiing, biathlon and Nordic combined.
When The Associated Press asked if the organization keeps track of accidents in cross-country and biathlon races, a FIS spokesperson said: “We track injuries during our races, but we don’t report not our public research at this time.”
Asked about concerns about artificial snow, the FIS did not respond. Martti Jylha, a Finnish cross-country skier and co-chairman of the FIS council’s athletes’ commission, did not respond.
There are other factors at play.
John Morton, a two-time Olympic biathlete, FIS-certified course inspector and Thetford resident who founded Morton Trails, a company that designs ski trails, said there are international standards for Nordic ski racing. He remembers attending a conference where they discussed banking turns on fast downhills, but there was resistance from some European officials who said it would make things too easy.
“There’s this constant drive to make it more exciting and more dramatic,” he said. “It’s very clear that they want challenging courses, they want to push the athletes to their limits.”
In this context, he said, considerations must be made.
“We have to recognize that the way they were designed, groomed and built for natural snow may need to be changed now because everything is faster – skis are faster, wax is faster,” he said. he declares.
Machine-made snow “isn’t really snow at all,” said Jim Steenburgh, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Utah. “What it is is water that is blown through nozzles that split the water into extremely small, tiny droplets that then freeze, whereas the structure of natural snow is fundamentally different.”
Machine-made snow has a higher water content, so it has a high density and tends to be really durable, which makes it ideal for ski racing, at least for downhill ski racing, a- he declared.
“For alpine skiing events, natural snow can actually be a disadvantage because riders prefer a hard, icy surface,” he said. “If a storm occurs before an alpine ski event, the natural snow is generally removed from the course. Nordic skiing is different, however.
British skier Andrew Young was on the fourth lap of a 15-kilometre mass-start cross-country ski race in Sweden in January when he crashed on the descent and ran through a fence, breaking his leg. He was rushed to hospital and struggled through six weeks of recovery time which ended his hopes for the 2021 World Championships.
Young said climate change has “definitely changed” cross-country skiing, but that’s not the only reason the sport is more dangerous.
Racetracks are shorter partly because of limited snow, but also to get skiers across the arena more often for spectators and TV cameras. As Young said, “Shorter loops mean more turns, which means more crashes.”
According to Luke Bodensteiner, the center’s general manager, the Soldier Hollow Nordic Center in Utah had about 10.5 miles of trails for racing during the 2002 Winter Olympics. But the shorter loops used for racing these days mean they only need 6.8 to 7.4 miles for the 2030 or 2034 Winter Games.
They like to keep the rails about 3 feet deep to make sure they hold up, he said. But that means a longer fall when a skier leaves the course.
“The problem I see is when there’s absolutely no natural snow and just a sliver of artificial snow for a race course,” Young said. “If something should then happen and someone crashes, the consequences of going off the track actually become quite serious.”
