A rant and an explination....

[Craig Naylor]

It's amazing that everyone noticed my pointing out its not a requirement.... and apparently decided that was my stance on the subject

...but missed my first sentence, that I believe it is a good thing for (fill in the blank on your preferred spelling of the term often used for beginners).

[Bob Beamesderfer]

How do event organizers ensure that noobies attend the meeting? How long is someone a noobie?

[Bill Martin]

How do event organizers ensure that noobies attend the meeting? How long is someone a noobie?

Has that ever been done? For any driver meeting? You ask them to come -- they do or they don't. I guess we could dip their fingers in purple ink.

[Steve Ekstrand]

I like the purple ink.... Then the anti-meeting types can cut their fingers off!

[George Schilling]

How do event organizers ensure that noobies attend the meeting? How long is someone a noobie?

Most humans have an innate desire to find our what's going, especially when in an unfamiliar situation. Noobs will come naturally to a meeting until all their questions are answered. As far as how long one is considered a noob, it's different for everybody. In fact, with my memory, I could be considered a noob because every time I come out, everything seems new to me.

Bottom line is, whether they come to a meeting or are taken under somebody's wing, as long as they get a proper safety briefing and their questions answered competently, isn't that all that matters?

[Craig Naylor]

An interesting article today on the subject (originally posted):


Athletes Flirting With Death Still Take Our Breath Away

2/16/2010 2:30 PM ET By John Walters


A friend of mine was seated in the office of a high-ranking executive at FOX when Rupert Murdoch phoned. For the next 10 minutes, as my friend sat there, the executive and the founder of FOX discussed some extremely minor details about an upcoming project. My friend, bemused, wondered why the NewsCorp CEO, one of the world's true media titans, would involve himself in such trifling matters.

"Because he wants what we all want," said the executive.

"What's that?" asked my friend.

"More."

Citius, altius, fortius. Swifter, higher, stronger.

More.

The death of Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvili last Friday -- the first death of an athlete at a Winter Olympics since 1964, when both a skier and a luger were killed, as was Kumaritashvili, during training (no Winter Olympian has died during competition ... yet) -- provoked the requisite scorn around the nation. I picture the politicos in "Blazing Saddles" barking, "Harrumph! Harrumph! Harrumph!" They froth at the consequence -- the luger's death -- as opposed to the incidence, which is the fact that we crave danger in most all of our sports. As do the athletes.

Last Thursday, on the eve of the Opening Ceremony (and of Kumaritashvili's death), the New York Times ran a special Winter Olympics preview section. The front-page story, written by John Branch, was eerily prescient. Entitled "The Perilympics," it featured a two-third page illustration of a figure skiing on a razor's edge above a caption that read: "The quaint Winter Games have evolved into an assortment of death-defying competitions that leave some athletes in the hospital while others head to the medal stand."

Branch stuck the landing on this call. To his credit, he never became sanctimonious. He described Shaun White's accident a couple of weeks earlier while attempting the McTwist 1260 -- "I was scared to do this trick," White admitted -- in which White's face met the edge of the half-pipe as he descended from a few stories above. An inch or so in the other direction, and White (below), who lost his helmet but not his teeth in the accident, may have snapped his neck.

"The replay was shown again and again," Branch wrote. "There were even replays of White watching the replay, wincing, then laughing in relief.

"Like the rest of us, he wanted to watch. There is compelling television, even in -- especially in -- those kinds of moments."

Exactly.

Have you been watching the first week of the Winter Olympics? On Saturday night during the finals of the ladies' moguls, as American Shannon Bahrke pistoned her legs down the trail, the announcer noted blithely that she has had six knee surgeries. Six. Is that all?

Bahrke won bronze.

On Sunday night J.R. Celski earned easy-chair status at a 90-degree angle from Bob Costas after winning bronze in the men's 1,500-meter short track event. Celski re-told the tale, which NBC had noted a night earlier, of how he filleted his left thigh at September's team trials and needed 60 stitches to close it. And how close he came to severing his femoral artery, in which case "I would have bled out (i.e., died) in 10 seconds."

Also on Sunday night, also off-handedly, the lovely Sandra Bezic, figure-skating analyst, remarked as an aside that Canadian Jessica Dube had needed 83 stitches to close a laceration in her cheek from partner Bryce Davison's skate. Eighty-three stitches. That's a shark-attack number for sutures.

And, of course, Bezic mentioned this as Davison and Dube were skating.

The examples are countless. You don't ascend to being a resident in the Olympic Village -- and you certainly don't ascend a medals podium -- without being fearless. As NBC's Brian Williams noted in a piece on Saturday evening, "it's in their DNA." Talent and determination are also prerequisites, surely. But so is a certain degree of recklessness.

It has been noted following Kumaritashvili's death and in Branch's piece on the eve of it, that 10 of the15 sports in the Winter Olympics require helmets. As does the Super Bowl, which is the Daytona 500 of the NFL; and as does the Daytona 500, which is the Super Bowl of NASCAR. And maybe it's just coincidence that the NFL and NASCAR are America's two most popular sports from a viewing standpoint.

Pat Tillman traded in one helmet (Arizona Cardinals) for another (U.S. Army). There were numerous ways in which Tillman could have served his country, but he left behind a seven-figure salary and all the adulation that goes with it to volunteer for the most dangerous possible active duty he could find. That's who he was; that's who most of these Olympians are.

They want more.

The tragedy of Kumaritashvili's death was that the IOC spent $105 million on a track and nobody considered that having steel poles so close to it was a hazard. It would have been comical, if it weren't so sad, seeing the workers place padding on the poles on Saturday -- as if that might lessen the dire consequences of a human projectile traveling 88 mph and coming to an abrupt stop.

And then, after investing $105 million on the world's fastest track, having a couple of handymen erect a plywood wall as if they'd gone down to Home Depot and forked over a few hundred dollars. As if they were a couple of dads building sets for the Whistler High School production of "Our Town."

That was tragic. Because that simple plywood wall may have saved Kumaritashvili's life.

But did you notice? While so many within and without the media were excoriating the IOC and the international luge federation (and, in regards to their callous laying of the blame at the luger's feet less than a day after he'd died, rightly so), drivers at Daytona were flirting with potholes. Now here was a track that actually was dysfunctional. That it only resulted in a few flat tires, as opposed to a fatality, is the only reason you aren't shoveling out from under a deluge of "Harrumph! Harrumph! Harrumph!" about the incompetence of NASCAR officials this week.

You can make some sports safer, but you cannot make them safe (If the NFL truly wanted to solve the concussion problem, it would do away with helmets; but then it would also be doing away with the collisions for which we have such bloodlust). Do you want to see a truly senseless death? Watch this video of Formula One driver Henry Surtees, whose biggest mistake was simply being in the wrong place in the wrong moment.

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You can argue that with each successive quadrennial, the Winter Olympics advances headlong, both figuratively and literally, down an ever more slippery slope in terms of safety. And while it was possible to find a luger last week who noted, "This is our lives here," you were also able to locate one who groused at the post-fatality safety precautions, remarking that the revisions had turned the track into "an old lady course."

It is the responsibility of the IOC, of the various federations, to protect athletes from themselves. To realize that Olympians, like the residents of Mount Olympus (from which the name derives), consider themselves immortal. But that, while heroic, they are mere flesh and blood. Kumaritashvili, speaking to his father just days before his death about his trepidation regarding the swift track, said, "I'll either win or die."

Win. Or die. But never quit.

As for us, we might as well admit that we admire those who live on the razor's edge. That we are as addicted to watching them flirt with disaster as they are to doing so. The first thing that aired on ESPN at the onset of this decade, significantly, was Travis Pastrana's "death-defying," 274-foot leap in a rally car over Long Beach Harbor. The event was supposedly momentous because it was a world-record distance, as if you and I had ever devoted a moment's concern to what was the farthest distance a car not named Chitty Chitty Bang Bang had ever flown.

No, it was momentous because there was the opportunity for disaster. That's what attracted Pastrana. And that's what attracted us. It's a funny thing about the term "death-defying." No one who has ever spoken or typed the term, or who has ever been about to challenge its boundaries, has ever been dead before.

You'd have to ask those who have crossed that line whether the risk was worth it.

[Steve Ekstrand]

The article COMPETELY misses the point.

Sure the luge is dangerous. Sure its thrilling. So lets take off those wimpy helmets! Why not put some metal spikes at the tops or bottoms of the turns to gash the wayward driver? Rollerball anybody?

You extend the wall up or install a screen or plexiglass and there wouldn't have been a death. Likely not even a major injury. Still would have been plenty thrilling.

The thrill didn't come from the carelessly placed pillars of death. Thud. Stillness was a major buzzkill for me.

[Bob Beamesderfer]

How do event organizers ensure that noobies attend the meeting? How long is someone a noobie?

Most humans have an innate desire to find our what's going, especially when in an unfamiliar situation. Noobs will come naturally to a meeting until all their questions are answered. As far as how long one is considered a noob, it's different for everybody. In fact, with my memory, I could be considered a noob because every time I come out, everything seems new to me.

Bottom line is, whether they come to a meeting or are taken under somebody's wing, as long as they get a proper safety briefing and their questions answered competently, isn't that all that matters?

Good points.

[Craig Naylor]

Steve, won't argue the safety issue point that the added wall should have been there from the start.

We apparently took different messages out of the article. I took the primary point of the article as many who compete in extreme sports know and understand the inherent dangers, and that's part of the thrill for them. Note the quote of the competitor claiming it's now an "old lady" course.

On the opposite side of the coin, like it or not, many spectators are watching waiting for what can for wrong. Do they want to see Death, no. Do they want to see wrecks, unfortunately yes. Since the article used this example... be honest, if Pastrana's car jump was for a foot more than the prior record, with untold run off after the landing... it would only draw a small crowd. The fact that it was so far above the record, over water, with next to no runoff after the landing.... gave it the in person crowd it attracted and international TV coverage.

[Craig Naylor]

In fact, with my memory, I could be considered a noob because every time I come out, everything seems new to me.

Early onset Alzheimer's kicking in???? The most recent stuff goes first.

[Steve Ekstrand]

A competitor calling it an old lady course is obviously complaining about modifying some turns and starting much lower on the hill, probably not the loss of the pillars of death.
Pendulum always swings too far.