On an alpine ski descent, athletes often reach 140 km/h on vertigo-inducing slopes. To avoid fatal accidents, safety has been reinforced in recent years.
Fifteen. Since 1959, fifteen professional athletes have lost their lives while racing or training in alpine skiing. The latest: Frenchman David Poisson, victim of a fall in training in Canada on November 13, 2017. The protective nets were not enough to stop the Savoyard, who died instantly after hitting a tree. A drama that had strongly marked the world of skiing, and which has since done everything to avoid such a tragedy.
“We have increasingly advanced safety standards, a bit like Formula 1”, explains Sébastien Santon, director of the Eclipse track in Courchevel, this vertiginous theater of men’s events. With his teams, he has been working for more than five years to secure the Eclipse, 3.2 km long at 30% average: “We started by designing the facilities, deploying the security system, modifying the bottom of the track. It took us almost two years.”
Before even thinking about protective nets, we had to review the last 200 meters of the track, because of a sharp turn. “When you know that the descenders arrive at 130, 140 km/h on the track, you can’t leave anything to chance”, emphasizes Sébastien Santon. On the other side of the Col de la Loze, in Méribel, his counterpart, Yannick Favières, did not have to modify the route of the Roc de Fer. On the other hand, it was necessary to rethink all the safety of this track, a remnant of the Olympic Games in Albertville in 1992.
Many nets, but not only
The most visible element, the nets are the basis of security, with a specific objective, explains Yannick Favières: “Our goal is to minimize the kinetics, that is to say that the impact of the stop must be as progressive as possible”. Concretely, this is materialized by several types of nets. First, net A, hung on a metal post: “They are 4m high, with 5cm mesh. Their purpose is not to stop the runner but to deflect him to redirect him towards the track. We install them in the fall, then we adjust with the snow “details the boss of Roc de Fer.
“B nets are 2m high, on stakes. We put two, three, sometimes 4 to 2 m apart. They should slow the skier down, not stop him dead. Each row of nets B must decrease the speed by 20 km/h.”
Yannick Favières, race manager of the Roc de Ferat franceinfo: sport
But with the mountain and its vagaries, you have to be able to adapt, especially during narrower passages. For this, Sébastien Santon and Yannick Favières have one last tool: the airfence. “It’s a big air mattress, it looks like a paddle, but softer”, describes Yannick Favières. “They absorb the kinetics and send the runner back in another direction. We put it on when we have no choice on hard installations like a TV tower”. In total, 17 km of nets surround the Roc de Fer and the Méribel training stadium, and up to 30 km in Courchevel for the Eclipse and the Emile-Allais stadium, the whole drawing long red snakes in the whiteness of the heights.
However, when you slide down a few centimeters of spatula and at 140 km / h from the walls which point up to 58% slope on these Worlds, the nets cannot be enough. Snow, itself, plays a central role in athlete safety. “We must maintain a stable snowpack thanks to the water injected snow, in order to avoid the formation of holes and other traps for the athletes”, says Sébastien Santon.
“The harder the snow, the easier it is to ensure safety, it’s paradoxical. The snow deforms less, it avoids unpleasant surprises.”
Yannick Favières, race manager of the Roc de Ferat franceinfo: sport
To complete the picture, the organizers are also applying paint to the tracks. “These are the sky blue bands that you see on TV. It gives relief to the slope so that the skier can see further”, says Sébastien Santon. “Besides, these are natural dyes, you can even eat them (laughs).” A substantial system, validated upstream by the International Ski Federation (Fis), uncompromising on the subject.
If, despite all these efforts, an athlete leaves the track and ends up in the net, injured, again everything is planned. “On the descent, we have seven teams made up of two trackers and a doctor, spread out along the route to intervene as quickly as possible”, describes Sébastien Santon. A helicopter and an ambulance are also always mobilized during a race, to evacuate any injured people to the hospitals of Chambéry or Grenoble, in addition to the advanced medical post in the arrival racket. “Everything is on point”concludes Sébastien Santon. “Even if we hope not to need it!”
