Is HS pole vaulting safer than skiing? Driving?

[Divalent]

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).

[KirkB]

Nice analysis, but maybe over-analyzed. Instead of trying to compute a risk factor per day or per session, I'd just go by yearly totals ... since the amount of time spent doing each activity in a year varies widely, and is difficult to estimate. To the extreme, you could say that each vault takes 1 minute, so you could compare each minute of vaulting to each minute of skiing or driving. But that would be a ridiculous comparison. When people compare the risk of sports (or driving), they just want to know if their son or daughter participates in PV rather than skiing FOR THE YEAR, is he or she MORE at risk, or LESS at risk.

That's all.

Kirk

[rainbowgirl28]

I don't think it's overanalyzed. You have to compare apples to apples. If skiing counts their deaths by the number of visits to the slopes, then if you are going to accurately compare pole vaulting, you have to count trips down the runway or number of practices. I think Jan did some kind of survey on this in Reno a long time ago, so he might actually have a guess.

The participation numbers are all on the low side. The NCCSI pulled that number out of thin air, despite Jan's protests that it had to be higher, based on the number of pole sales to high schools each year. Jan just did some math based on number of schools. My numbers are based on number of known competitors in a few states as a percentage of track participants in that state, extrapolated to number of participants in all states.

The problem is that all sports look at participants for these things, not competitors. Until someone does an extensive survey of HS coaches, these PV numbers exclude vaulters who try pole vault in practice and never achieve a height in a meet.

The reason we don't have data on this is that pole vault is not a SPORT. We are an event within a sport. So it's already not apples to apples to compare us to other SPORTS. The number of track participants is published every year by the NFHS. They don't try to track how many kids do each event.


College men are definitely the most dangerous group, per capita, even if you exclude Leon Roach's tragic death.