Image from metro.co.uk
International Olympic Committee officials, charged with monitoring injuries among Olympians, are considering dropping ski and snowboard slopestyle because of the “unacceptably high” number of injuries at the Sochi Winter Games.
Lars Engebretsen, head of scientific activities at the IOC’s medical and scientific department, said injury rates in slopestyle were “much higher than any other sport in Sochi.”
“To me it was unacceptably high, absolutely … very, very, very high,” Engebretsen said in an interview with The Associated Press. “Right now the injury rate as it was in Sochi was too high to be a sport that we have in the Olympics.”
The decision would ultimately have to be made by the IOC’s executive board, led by Thomas Bach. Engebretsen was not on that board, and he said his “gut feeling” was that the IOC will give slopestyle another chance to prove itself and keep it on the program at the next winter games in Pyeongchang, South Korea, in 2018.
Engebretsen went on to say that, “Slopestyle is exciting. But it’s just become, right now anyway, too exciting.”