Them Winter Sports are Getting Too Brutal (Shut it Down)

With XGames, Olympic Training, Dewtour, and the Boloney Battle all gearing up to full swing, the crashes are getting graphic.  And ugly.  And nearly death-inducing.  For years now free skiing and snowboarding have gotten more "extreme" and are now resulting in tricks so complicated and technical that the slightest miscalculation guarantees a hospital visit.  My call?  Shut it down.  Shut it down now.  To summarize a few:

Kevin Pearce:  Olympic halfpipe training.  Trying to go for the double cork - ugh, I hate to even say the phrase - didn't quite make it.  On the second off axis rotation, he clipped his toe edge on the deck or top of the wall, and slammed, hard, on his head.  Even though he was wearing a helmet, he basically gave himself the scrambler and received a severe traumatic brain injury.  And get this, he even had a helmet on.  He would have been a dead man riding without one.  He went from unresponsive to "recovering" while in a hospital near Park City, Utah.  Prognosis, who knows.

Simon Dumont:  This time, Xgames training in Aspen, Simon slammed on a double flip (I don't know if it was front or back) and according to ESPN "exploded off the deck."  Lovely.  He then catapulted all the way to the base of the pipe where he lay for 10 minutes.  Ugly.

Danny Davis:  Another gold medal contender for the Olympics, this guy got shutdown not on some double back cork mcrodeo, but good old Darwin stupidity.  Jumping on a quad at 3am, he slammed into a fence after completing - in I believe a Dewtour stop - perhaps the "greatest half-pipe runs in the history of the sport."  So excited, he cracked his pelvis and a vertebrate.  Great....

But then, Shaun White is nailing tricks that are truly video-game quality.  His most recent, which will likely make it into his Olympic run, not just a double cork, but a double cork mctwist 1260.  I'm not sure what that is, but take a look.

Shaun White Double McTwist - watch more skate, snow, surf, and moto videos

These kids are getting out of control and paying the price for it.  I'm sure they will all heal up and get back on the slopes, but for sure, the crashes will keep coming.