Is HS pole vaulting safer than skiing? Driving?
Posted: Sat Oct 31, 2009 12:24 pm
Is HS pole vaulting safer than skiing? How about driving? I though I’d do the numbers thing to compare these activities.
To compare to skiing, I got information on the death rate in that sport, and used it to predict the number of deaths expected in the HS PVing population if the risk was the same. If HS pole vaulting was as dangerous as skiing, how many deaths would we predict in the sport of HS PVing, per year and per decade?
The available information in skiing shows that the death rate is approximately 1 death per 1 million resort “visits”, and the data on participation is very good because the resorts know how many lift tickets they sell. In HS PV, two complications are uncertainty of the number of HS PV participants, and how often they “participate” per year. I have made very conservative estimates to generate a range of predictions.
First: the number of HS PV athletes: NCCSI says ~25,000, Jan Johnson says more like 60,000, and Rainbowgirl says ~75,000. To be conservative but allow a bit of reasonableness, I’ll estimate by using both 25,000 and 50,000. Second, for each athlete, how many times in a year do they “participate”? To be extremely conservative, I chose to say that they participated only 8 weeks in a year, and only 4 days in each week, for a total of 32 “participations” per year. (Later I will do a scaling to also factor in that a day of skiing is typically much longer than a PV training or meet session).
Okay, so skiing is one death per million visits. If our HS PVing population was either of the sizes above, and if PV was as dangerous as skiing (equating a PV session as equal to a skiing “visit” for now), how many deaths per year and per decade would we expect to see? 32 participations per year times 25,000 is 800,000 participations per year, so 0.8 deaths per year, or 8 deaths per decade. If we use 50,000 participants, the estimates would be 1.6 deaths per year, 16 per decade. On this basis, I think the PV data for HS deaths (one in last 6 years, or 0.16 per year?) is lower.
However, when you go skiing, you generally spend a lot more time in the activity that day than a HS PVer will spend training or competing that day. So the estimates probably should be adjusted to reflect the risk per time spent doing the activity. I’ll assume a typical skier skis for 6 hours a “visit” and a PV session is 2 hours, so the PV risk should be adjusted by a factor of 3 (again, I’m trying to be very conservative here). That “discounts” the number of expected deaths in HS PV (assuming it is as risky as skiing) to 0.26 and 0.52 per year (2.6 and 5.2 per decade) for the 25K and 50K participation groups. Still, all estimates are higher than the actual rate over the last 6 years, and since I have deliberately erred on the side of being conservative, I think the general conclusion that HS PVing it is at least somewhat safer than skiing is probably reasonable.
Note: my purpose here was not to provide an accurate estimate, only to get a sense of the comparative risk of the two activities (since they are frequently compared here). The numbers are very good for determining the skiing risk, but I've assumed a lot to estimate the PVing risk. I sincerely hope no one looks at this post and thinks there no reason to continue to work to reduce the risk in this sport, since both sports are risky, and we should do all that reasonably can be done to make them less risky.
I will also note that I restricted my analysis to HS PV. Had I tried to do college, I think I would have come up with a much riskier estimate, since the number of participants are vastly lower (although they certainly spend more time “participating”). Part of that would be understandable, given that college athletes are going higher.
Finally: a quick estimate of expected automobile deaths: the rate for the US population as a whole (*NOT* for HS aged drivers!) is 1.5 deaths per 100 million miles traveled. If a typical HS athlete travels 4000 miles a year in a car (driven by a typical american), then 25,000 HS students total 100 million miles per year, so one would expect 1.5 deaths per year in this group (or 3 per year if we use 50,000; and so 15 or 30 deaths per decade). Even assuming an average speed of 30 mph to get 133 hours of time spend in a car, the risk of death is substantially higher when in a moving car than for equivalent time spent PVing.
Update: found some data on HS football: ~13 deaths per year and 1.14 million participating athletes. (Note: about 1/2 of these are "football related", like heat stroke during practice or game, and sudden cardiac arrest in individuals with some sort of hidden medical problem). So at that incident rate one would expect 0.28 deaths per year out of a pool of 25,000 athletes, or 0.56 per year out of 50,000. So PVing appears to be a tad bit safer (and certainly no evidence that football is safer).
To compare to skiing, I got information on the death rate in that sport, and used it to predict the number of deaths expected in the HS PVing population if the risk was the same. If HS pole vaulting was as dangerous as skiing, how many deaths would we predict in the sport of HS PVing, per year and per decade?
The available information in skiing shows that the death rate is approximately 1 death per 1 million resort “visits”, and the data on participation is very good because the resorts know how many lift tickets they sell. In HS PV, two complications are uncertainty of the number of HS PV participants, and how often they “participate” per year. I have made very conservative estimates to generate a range of predictions.
First: the number of HS PV athletes: NCCSI says ~25,000, Jan Johnson says more like 60,000, and Rainbowgirl says ~75,000. To be conservative but allow a bit of reasonableness, I’ll estimate by using both 25,000 and 50,000. Second, for each athlete, how many times in a year do they “participate”? To be extremely conservative, I chose to say that they participated only 8 weeks in a year, and only 4 days in each week, for a total of 32 “participations” per year. (Later I will do a scaling to also factor in that a day of skiing is typically much longer than a PV training or meet session).
Okay, so skiing is one death per million visits. If our HS PVing population was either of the sizes above, and if PV was as dangerous as skiing (equating a PV session as equal to a skiing “visit” for now), how many deaths per year and per decade would we expect to see? 32 participations per year times 25,000 is 800,000 participations per year, so 0.8 deaths per year, or 8 deaths per decade. If we use 50,000 participants, the estimates would be 1.6 deaths per year, 16 per decade. On this basis, I think the PV data for HS deaths (one in last 6 years, or 0.16 per year?) is lower.
However, when you go skiing, you generally spend a lot more time in the activity that day than a HS PVer will spend training or competing that day. So the estimates probably should be adjusted to reflect the risk per time spent doing the activity. I’ll assume a typical skier skis for 6 hours a “visit” and a PV session is 2 hours, so the PV risk should be adjusted by a factor of 3 (again, I’m trying to be very conservative here). That “discounts” the number of expected deaths in HS PV (assuming it is as risky as skiing) to 0.26 and 0.52 per year (2.6 and 5.2 per decade) for the 25K and 50K participation groups. Still, all estimates are higher than the actual rate over the last 6 years, and since I have deliberately erred on the side of being conservative, I think the general conclusion that HS PVing it is at least somewhat safer than skiing is probably reasonable.
Note: my purpose here was not to provide an accurate estimate, only to get a sense of the comparative risk of the two activities (since they are frequently compared here). The numbers are very good for determining the skiing risk, but I've assumed a lot to estimate the PVing risk. I sincerely hope no one looks at this post and thinks there no reason to continue to work to reduce the risk in this sport, since both sports are risky, and we should do all that reasonably can be done to make them less risky.
I will also note that I restricted my analysis to HS PV. Had I tried to do college, I think I would have come up with a much riskier estimate, since the number of participants are vastly lower (although they certainly spend more time “participating”). Part of that would be understandable, given that college athletes are going higher.
Finally: a quick estimate of expected automobile deaths: the rate for the US population as a whole (*NOT* for HS aged drivers!) is 1.5 deaths per 100 million miles traveled. If a typical HS athlete travels 4000 miles a year in a car (driven by a typical american), then 25,000 HS students total 100 million miles per year, so one would expect 1.5 deaths per year in this group (or 3 per year if we use 50,000; and so 15 or 30 deaths per decade). Even assuming an average speed of 30 mph to get 133 hours of time spend in a car, the risk of death is substantially higher when in a moving car than for equivalent time spent PVing.
Update: found some data on HS football: ~13 deaths per year and 1.14 million participating athletes. (Note: about 1/2 of these are "football related", like heat stroke during practice or game, and sudden cardiac arrest in individuals with some sort of hidden medical problem). So at that incident rate one would expect 0.28 deaths per year out of a pool of 25,000 athletes, or 0.56 per year out of 50,000. So PVing appears to be a tad bit safer (and certainly no evidence that football is safer).