David Poisson (French WC skier) fatal training crash

[Dexter Rutecki]

Guy was definitely one of the up and coming young guns a few years ago. Terrible--apparently no details on what actually happened yet. AFAIK it's been well over 10 years since something like this happened. Happened at Nakiska.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgar...erta-1.4400436

[Maximus Farcisimus]

RIP

[neufox47]

RIP, great skier at the end of his career. Very sad. DH can be unforgiving.

[ill-advised strategy]

wondering what happened, but also kind of almost don't want to know. :-(

[XXX-er]

I was talking to a racing type bud, he said thru the B net into the woods

cuz there's no A on training courses

[garyfromterrace]

Very sad. Nakiska is an unforgiving place to crash at extremely high speed especially early season. Yeah XXXer, through the B net into the woods. I'm surprised there aren't more fatalities there to be honest. It can get icy. People ski fast (sometimes without any skills) and there's plenty of off camber that could funnel you into trees if you fell in the wrong place.

Poisson seemed like a really great guy according to back stories in the news.

[crashidy]

Nakiska is good for at least one fatality a year. I used to work EMS out there. All the upper runs fall line goes into the trees to make for better racing.

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[steezybomber]

RIP. Vibes to friends and family. truly sad.

[Dexter Rutecki]

I was talking to a racing type bud, he said thru the B net into the woods

cuz there's no A on training courses

That had been my guess. It's kind of amazing how lucky we (ski racers and I guess skiers in general) usually get in not having bad collisions with objects off of trails. I've become much more aware of this in recent years watching kids ski (free ski) at fairly high speeds near the edges of trails. Racing is probably generally safer because of netting and the sets *should* take into account how people are likely to exit a course, but it's all pretty fucking risky when you start to look for the danger that exists. In theory a course with B netting properly installed should be safe, but given how often we (racing in general) get away with not having an incident and and the pain in the ass nature of constantly dealing with netting it's almost inevitable at some point that something will go wrong. And who knows, maybe he went off course in a completely unpredictable way and there wasn't enough netting.

My memory is that the last WC racer to die was also French--Regine Cavagnoud (10+ years ago?). Probably Uli Maier in the 90's before that. All three speed events. Didn't realize Nakiska was more prone to these types of things, but watching the Olympics there way back when on TV it did seem like a lot of turny, off camber stuff with trees around.

Terrible.

[comish]

^^ Agree with the above. Watching my own 9yr old bomb around and getting into racing definitely gives me the heeby jeebies sometimes when you do stop to think about what can happen... Very sad.

[XXX-er]

IME the amount of time/effort/money it takes to set up a DH course is pretty crazy so I assume they could only do so much safety for a training course but we don't really know much for sure just yet

[Dexter Rutecki]

IME the amount of time/effort/money it takes to set up a DH course is pretty crazy so I assume they could only do so much safety for a training course but we don't really know much for sure just yet

Right, that's kind of what I was getting at. Especially a WC team will have resources at their disposal, but for training they won't have the several hundred people a WC race would have. Training SL it almost doesn't matter, and GS with a decent trail and sensible set you can usually get away with minimal fencing (although you shouldn't), but I could easily see that (without meaning to) people might decide to go ahead without installing the extra doubled up (or triple) B nets that a race would probably require. Skiers go through single layers all the time. If it's icey...and they're always in the speed suits...well. This will probably stick in my mind as we get going this year with the kids racing.

[XXX-er]

I was told that A net is set up by a company that gets contracted

IMO it looks like construction, Probably more that a voly crews would be up for

I remember setting up 7 layers of B net and then i think we moved it ... again

[Dexter Rutecki]

Oh yeah, A net is fixed and definitely not installed for a particular race (or training). Big metal struts installed into the hill to hold it up. But it almost always works (I think at Kitzbuhel one year Pietro Vitalini flew over some A net at the Steilhang but it had snowed a few feet the day before so he was basically fine).

Thing is, I think in theory unless a guy is in the air (probably more than five feet?) B net should do the job, provided there is enough of it in the right place. But every now and then someone goes under, somehow. And you really need multiple layers for speed events, so like I said, I could easily see people figuring they could get by without all the netting that should really be there (not that I have any idea that that is what happened, just saying I could imagine that scenario).

[Mofro261]

Just picturing Herman Maier's catapult over the B-net in Nagano- all it takes is one bad bounce/ compression at speed to get airborne and over the B-nets.

Very sorry to hear about Poisson.

[gramboh]

Tragic accident, RIP.

Growing up racing in the Calgary area, I remember hearing of lots of accidents at Nakiska. Not just racing, but racers freeskiing and just general public sliding into the trees at high speeds. There are a lot of places you can go really fast there, and they have (or at least had at the time) really good grooming so it was easy to do. Those off camber steep fall line runs on the upper mountain especially.

[willywhit]

Just hearing about this now watching the downhill at Lake Louise on TV. Tragic

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