Sporting memories, watching a friend break his arm badly

Injuries happen in sports and everyone that gets involved with it is aware of the fact that this can happen. I haven't been privy to a great many injuries but I have seen a few but this one was probably the one that sticks out in my mind the most because it was just me and a couple of pals that were out skiing and probably screwing around too much and well, things can get nasty when that happens.

I was the type of skier that would often get warned by ski patrol about skiing to aggressively on the bunny slopes but I wasn't doing it like that to try to show off to the other skiers, it was because this resort didn't have very many slopes early on in the season and I was just trying to have some fun.

I liked to get airborne when skiing and so did my friends so that is exactly what we were doing.

src

There was a place nearby that me and my then teenage friends would regularly go to because they had night skiing and we were allowed, provided we got our homework done and all that stuff you have to do when you are a teenager, done for the day and we would load up into one of our cars and head up there. It was great fun and a lot of freedom was involved playing loud music on the ride up and getting onto the slopes where the 3 of us would treat every run as if it was a race. Other slopes, ones that had big moguls (bumps) on them, we would stop to try to see who could get the biggest air. Getting airborne in skiing is a lot of fun but obviously, this brings about the most chance for injury other than flying off the side Sonny Bono style. We rarely fell, but when we did it was usually kind of scary. Ski equipment is designed pretty well to fly off of you when you fall and I am still kind of amazed that the technology is both designed to stay on your boots but also fly off your boots if a certain type of pressure is put on it.

src

Here's a nice article about why skis come off when you fall and how they are designed to do exactly that.

Well on one night the 3 of us were going down a black diamond slope, which is the 2nd hardest kind of slope there is at most resorts, and we were carving and jumping and doing our usual things. This is fun midweek at night because most of the other customers either have jobs or school or something like that so the place is pretty empty and especially on the more difficult slopes, we can do whatever we want. That is exactly what we did.

Myself, Shawn, and my friend Scott were all about the same ability levels and because we were in our late teens, we were all fearless. Scott went first on this particular run and when he hit a mogul and fell it was more like a slide to the side, which isn't that bad because there is no tumbling and flipping over and what not. It was a bit of a ritual that when someone in our group would fall we would go after them and then "shred" right uphill from them and cover them in snow. That is exactly what Shawn and I did to Scott after he fell as we proceeded to get to the bottom of the hill.

When we got to the bottom it was taking Scott a long time to get to us and we figured maybe he was having an equipment problem so we went back up the lift to have another run down the mountain. We could see him still lying in the same position and shouted something like "haha, get up you jerk!" then got to the top and went back down and noticed that he was still lying in exactly the same position as he was when he first fell and when we saw him from the ski life. He was groaning a bit and said to get him some help because his arm, in his words, "is fucked." He could barely move to show us but there was blood all over his jacket and the snow.

We immediately went and got ski patrol which is contactable at all ski lifts.

src

Ski patrol are medically trained and very gifted skiers. They put him on a snow gurney and then carefully got him off the slope and up to the medical center at the resort. The blood from Scott's arm remained on the slope. We went to meet him at the medical center and Scott, who was normally a very tough dude, was wincing in pain and when we saw the wound, it was pretty clear why this is the case, one of the bones of his forearm had penetrated both his skin and his jacket on that slope and he would end up spending the next 5 months with his arm wrapped up like a taco.

Skiing is no joke and done in a crazy sort of style like we did it, it can be extremely dangerous. People die from skiing every single year. I would never attempt to sorts of things that we did back in those days but hey man, when you are a teenager and it pretty great shape you feel as though you are invincible. I would end up skiing with Scott many many more times after that, but he was never the same as far as trying the big jumps was concerned.

I still keep in touch with him and he goes skiing on a regular basis but now does it in a back and forth fashion and rarely does anything airborne on purpose. I don't get to go very often anymore because of job and work and normal adult stuff but I will still try to get airborne every now and then if the conditions are just right. I will say this though: As you get older your knees start to not be able to take on the vigor of skiing - they just aren't really built to be able to handle it after a while.