Superpipe Deaths and Risk Tautology

The BBC has a headline story on the second professional athlete to be seriously injured or die on a superpipe in Utah.

The four-time Winter X Games champion crashed on the same superpipe where snowboarder Kevin Pearce suffered a traumatic brain injury during a training accident in late 2009.

[…]

“There are inherent risks in everything,” [Peter Judge, chief executive of Canada’s freestyle team] said prior to her death.

“Freestyle is a very safe sport in large part because we had to build a safe sport in order to get into the Olympics.”

Judge really should explain exactly why he believes the sport is safe instead of using a tautology — saying the same thing twice.

If I were to use similar reasoning as the above I could say this is a brilliant blog post because in order for it to be a blog post it has to be brilliant. What I want to hear is how vulnerabilities and threats are addressed at a reasonable level of detail. The more detailed the scrutiny the more likely improvements can be found; two major accidents by top talent on the same spot in two years (high severity and high frequency) suggests some safety gaps may be at hand.

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