Just how dangerous are Winter Olympic sports?

Dramatic crashes, spectacular spills and high-profile injuries – if anything, a week and a half of action in Pyeongchang has proved Winter Olympics events carry with them a fairly high degree of risk.

Australian snowboarder Jessica Rich competed at the Games just a month after tearing her ACL, and revealed she had previously broken her back, and twice broken her collarbone.

Her team-mate, Cam Bolton competed in the snowboard cross with a suspected broken wrist, while Jarryd Hughes, who won silver, has had five knee operations over the course of his career.

British speed skater Elise Christie was injured in a dramatic crash in the 1500m, and snowboarder Katie Ormerod broke her heel during training. Australian snowboarder Tess Coady also sustained an injury during training, blaming strong winds. There have been numerous other examples.

So, just how dangerous are the various Winter Olympic sports?

We don’t yet have the final injury statistics from Pyeongchang, but journal articles detailing injury records are available from the 2010 Games in Vancouver, and 2014 in Sochi.

I’ve combined the figures from both 2010 and 2014 to get a combined injury rate per 100 athletes for each event:

The figures show that, not surprisingly, the most dangerous events are those that combine high speeds and high jumps.

The relatively new events of slopestyle snowboarding and skiing are both in the top five, with snowboarding having a particularly high rate of injuries at 37 per 100 athletes.

The aerials skiing event also results in a high rate of injury, particularly during the Sochi Games, where the injury rate was 48.8 per 100 athletes, a staggeringly high figure.

The reports also looked at how severe injuries were by measuring the rate of injuries resulting in recovery times greater than a week. The moguls, slopestyle (snowboard) and cross (both ski and snowboard) all had higher rates of more severe injuries at Sochi, with all these events having a severe injury rate of 14 or higher.

Curling, on the other hand, is fairly low down the list for injury rates, but possibly not quite as low as you might expect. The most common cause of injury among curlers at Sochi was “overuse with gradual onset” which refers to injuries sustained from cumulative trauma or repetitive use and stress. Figures from 2010, where the physical injury location was recorded, show curling injuries included strains and tendonitis of the arms, lower back and thigh.

Overuse injuries were also quite common in bobsledding and cross-country skiing, while contact with the ground was the most common cause of injury for slopestyle, halfpipe and cross events.

So how does this compare with the Summer Olympics?

Using the same methods for the 2016 and 2012 summer Olympics, we can compare the overall injury rates. The Winter Games comes out slightly ahead at 12.6 injuries per 100 athletes, whereas the rate from the past two summer Olympics is 11.3.

The only summer sports approaching the higher injury rate snowboarding and skiing events are BMX and taekwondo:

The summer events also generally resulted in less severe injuries. Looking again at injuries that had a recovery time of more than seven days, at the Rio Olympics, BMX was the only event that had a rate over 10 per 100 athletes.