Protection & Safety
Risk Management
Risk Management Behaviours in Snow Sports
Risk management is defined as the central concept used by high performance snow sport stakeholders, including athletes, coaches, and healthcare providers, to approach injury prevention. Thus far, recent works have included disciplines like alpine skiing, snowboarding, and freestyle skiing among these high performance snow sports.
The risk management process involves actively assessing, managing, and sometimes accepting risks. The complexity and dynamic nature of sports injuries, coupled with the constant exposure to risk in high performance snow sports, make the concept of risk management more representative and precise than traditional injury prevention.
The fundamental goal of this approach is not to eliminate risk entirely, but to acknowledge and determine how much risk can be dealt with when preventing injuries. This is particularly relevant because high performance snow sports is an environment where the goal is to win, and "it is the fastest athlete that wins the medal”.
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Risk Management to Prevent Injuries in Snow Sports
Risk management is defined as the core concept where injury prevention is approached by assessing, managing, and sometimes accepting risks. Due to the complexity, dynamic nature of sports injuries, and the constant exposure to risk in HPSS, the concept of risk management is more representative and precisethan traditional injury prevention methods. Risk management involves acknowledging and addressing how much risk can be dealt with, rather than seeking to achieve null risk.
Risk management in the high performance snow sports can be defined by:
High Performance Snow Sports Culture
The nature and culture of high performance snow sports, which involves speed, great performances, and business aspects, means that participants operate in an challenging and demanding performance environment. This performance-driven mentality necessitates the acceptance of risk.
Decision-Making Outcome
Risk management represents the endpoint of a decision-making process aimed at dealing with the inherent risks of these sports, which is heavily influenced by various factors. This process determines the athletes' behaviours concerning risk: accepting the risk, managing the risk, or deciding to stop or avoid the risk because it is "too dangerous".
1. Accepting the Risk: Going for it
This behaviour involves accepting unavoidable risks and pushing limits. This approach is intrinsically linked to the performance-driven mentality of high performance snow sports, where "it is the fastest who wins, not the safest" (quote by an athlete participating in a study). This decision reflects an acceptance of risk as "part of the game".
2. Managing and Dealing with the Risk
This involves actively working to mitigate risk factors. Experienced athletes primarily execute this approach, relying on their knowledge and awareness of risk-taking. Training is seen as essential for preparing athletes to manage risk and understand their limits.
3. Not Going for It: Stopping
This decision is made when certain situations or conditions are considered "too dangerous" and could potentially lead to injury, meaning they are "not worth taking". This judgement is influenced by both athlete-related factors, such as fatigue or lack of mental readiness, and external factors, such as poor snow and weather conditions.
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Factors Influencing the Risk Management Decision-Making Process
The risk management process is modulated by numerous factors that influence an athlete's decision-making and preventive behaviours:
1.Modulating Factors
These include athlete-related factors (e.g., physical training, mental readiness, previous injuries, self-care and health and risk awareness, rest and recovery, nutrition, and skiing and skills techniques) and external factors (e.g., course setting and design, protective and performance equipment, safety measures, snow and weather conditions, and organisational and contextual reasons).
Athletes highlight the importance of being mentally focused and ready, as well as learning to listen to their mind and body (e.g., fatigue, pain) for making better risk-taking decisions. External factors, such as bad snow and weather conditions, are often weighed when deciding if a risk is worth taking.
2.Contextual Factors & Overarching Aspects
Contextual factors play a pivotal role in the risk management approach. These are defined as the structural, institutional, and cultural systems in which athletes operate within snow sports. They encompass the nature and culture of high performance snow sports, and pressure and societal factors and systems. Pressure can come from athletes themselves, their team, or external sources like media, sponsors, spectators, and parents.
By considering these diverse factors and their interactions, these can significantly guide and influence the risk management process and injury prevention behaviours.
The development and implementation of the decision-making strategies are significantly influenced by three overarching contextual factors: experience, open communication, and shared responsibilities among all stakeholders. These overarching aspects are crucial for successful injury prevention via risk management.
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Experience as a Guide:
Experience acts as a major modifier, shaping the resulting risk management behaviours by improving the knowledge and skills needed for risk acceptance and management.
Experienced athletes, through repeated exposure, gain insights into balancing pushing their bodies to their limits and respecting those limits to assess risks. Training exposure is of great value to improve athlete’s decision-making strategies when racing.
Experience increases athletes' awareness of risk-taking, the value of health, and the impact of injury, which consequently raises their focus on injury prevention and staying fit to perform optimally. Athletes who have sustained injuries are often more open to injury prevention because they have experienced what it means to be out of training and racing.
Experiences contribute to a learning process where maturation and previous injuries influence the development of preventive strategies. More experienced athletes may feel more empowered and take ownership of their decisions, particularly concerning load management and whether to continue or stop training.
Younger athletes, lacking this experience and awareness, require external guidance and educational interventions from coaches and staff focused on developing skills to adequately assess and manage risks.
Open Communication and Shared Responsibilities:
Trustworthy, honest, and open communication among athletes, their teams, and external stakeholders is crucial for building trustful relationships and facilitating shared decision-making on risk management.
All internal stakeholders (the athlete's team, including coaches, medical staff, etc.) and external stakeholders (e.g., race directors, media, FIS, national governing bodies) have a key role and shared responsibilities in making the environment as safe as possible and controlling the intrinsic risks of the sport.
Strong social surroundings and team work and support encourage and promote the development of the athlete’s decision-making related to risk management.
Risk communication among all stakeholders is instrumental in the athlete's final decision regarding whether to accept, manage, or avoid taking risks. However, this process can be hampered if athletes hide pain or complaints from their team to maintain performance, thereby accepting a high risk of injury.
The integration of these interdisciplinary stakeholders is critical for assessing, managing, and communicating risks when implementing preventive measures.
Risk Management in Alpine Skiing
The Risk Management Framework
Risk in snow sports cannot be eliminated. Speed, snow, equipment, and ambition are part of the sport. The framework offers a shared way of seeing the system, and a shared way of deciding what to do about it. This framework distributes accessibility for injury risk across athletes, coaches, technicians, medical staff, organisers, and governing bodies.
The Prevention Wheel gives stakeholders a common map of where risk lives. The decision-making tree gives them a common method for choosing the next move. When both are used together, prevention becomes less a matter of individual judgement under pressure and more a matter of coordinated work across the whole system, which is, in the end, what risk management in this sport has always required.
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The Prevention Wheel: five layers of one system
The Wheel is built from five integrated layers, each addressing a different question stakeholders must answer when assessing risk.
The outer layer maps the stakeholders: athletes, coaches, medical and technical team staff, management, ski racing suppliers, governing bodies (including FIS), and the scientific community. The next layer identifies the five domains in which risk lives: organisational and contextual, snow and environment, equipment, course design, and athlete elements. A third layer captures the risk priorities, ranging from low to unacceptable, and acknowledges that different stakeholders perceive the same risk differently. A fourth layer specifies the graded timeframes, from immediate action to long-term intervention. The innermost layer names the target groups at the centre of the intervention.
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The insight built into the Wheel is that a single risk almost never sits with one stakeholder, in one domain, on one timeframe. Snow conditions on race day involve organisers, equipment technicians, athletes, and coaches at the same time. The Wheel is designed to make those interdependencies visible.
The Decision-Making Tree: from awareness to action
If the Wheel is a map, the Tree is the route. It operationalises the framework into a five-step process across three phases: risk identification, risk assessment, and risk mitigation. The aim is plain: help stakeholders make thoughtful, less arbitrary decisions when they are facing a real situation rather than reasoning in the abstract.
Risk identification (Steps 1 and 2).
Step 1 defines whether the situation should be considered a problem. Stakeholders ask three questions: what is the impact on health and performance, how important is the risk (low, moderate, high, or unacceptable), and what is its temporality. If the situation is not problematic, no further action is needed. Step 2 then identifies which stakeholders have the access, reach, and feasibility to act, and whether preventive measures are already in place.
Risk assessment (Steps 3 and 4).
Step 3 selects the domains and intervention areas that each stakeholder can actually influence, and confirms the target group. Step 4 sets the action timeframe (immediate, short-, mid-, or long-term) and matches it to available resources. If resources are insufficient, the process names what is missing and which other stakeholders might fill the gap.
Risk mitigation (Step 5).
The planned action is taken, based on all prior reasoning and directed at the identified target group.
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The Tree was developed iteratively with international expert stakeholders. The later addition of graded timeframes and graded risk categories is part of what makes it usable across very different scenarios, from a single training session to a season-long policy change.
Tips for Practice: Managing Injury Risk
In the high-speed environment of competitive alpine skiing, no single actor can carry the full weight of safety. The story of how the community is learning to prevent serious injury is, in practice, the story of how to work together.
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References
Bonell Monsonís O, Verhagen E, Gouttebarge V, Alhammoud M, Collins D, Ellenberger L, et al. Risk management framework for competitive alpine skiing—co-developed with stakeholders. BMJ Open Sport & Exercise Medicine. 2025;11:e002507.
Bonell Monsonís O, Verhagen E, Spörri J, et al. ‘Every turn can be the last one I do’ - Perceptions of injury risk in high-performance snow sports and its implication for injury prevention. Injury Prevention 2024;30:341-349.
Safe Jump Design in Downhill Alpine Skiing
This project, developed together with University of Innsbruck, introduces a data-driven standard for safety in jump design in Downhill Alpine Skiing.
This is not about making the sport less thrilling; it is about protecting our athletes to push boundaries safely.
For coaches, race directors, and race organisers, this represents a fundamental shift in how we approach course design.
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