Tue Feb 22/05
Helmets are an interesting topic, right?

"Helmetless ski racer dies at Apex [Alpine Resort]," went the headline. And it didn't lie: an 18-year-old skier participating in an endurance race ("in which skiers and snowboarders are challenged to complete all 24 of the mountain's advanced black-diamond and expert double-black-diamond runs in the space of one day") hit a tree and was killed. And he wasn't wearing a helmet. There is rather less to the story than the headline suggests, however, namely, this (my emphasis): "Police told local media the boy's injuries would not have been minimized had he been wearing a helmet."

So why are we talking about helmets? Because:

Dean Erickson, 31, a former B.C. Alpine ski coach and racer, says Apex should make head-protection gear mandatory in the event...

"They should have been recommending helmets. I would have made helmets mandatory."

Seriously — that's it. There is no explanation as to why Dean Erickson should be considered an authority on this, other than his being a "former B.C. Alpine ski coach and racer" — that is, according to my research, a level one certified ski coach (it's a three-day course) who hasn't paid his dues for "at least two years," and who doesn't seem to have had any significant ski racing career at all. (Even if he had, it wouldn't be the sort of race in which the kid died at Apex.)

Either Erickson has some basis to comment on this issue of which we should have been made aware, or this story is just another artifact of the 21st century Cult of Safety.