Snow injury specialist Jasper Shealy, professor emeritus of industrial and systems engineering at the Rochester Institute of Technology says skiers run into snowboarders more often than the other way around according to a post on a New York Times blog.
“Most people think that snowboarders whack into skiers,” Mr. Shealy says. “But it’s completely the other way around,” a phenomenon related to how each group falls. “Snowboarders stop abruptly,” Shealy says, their boards biting into the snow. “Skiers slide,” he says, often into a downed snowboarder.
Yes. We can stop and even turn. . .
This is quite a relevant topic for me today actually.
I teach snowboarding and I wholeheartedly agree with this statement.
I was teaching a student today, riding slowly down the hill on my heels, I was cutting slowly across the slope whilst talking to my student. A skier clips the nose of my board going pretty fast. The skier was above me, I was bearly moving.
I stopped her and told her:
A: I don’t have eyes in the back of my head
B: You were above me on the slope
C: It is a big, wide, empty slope
Her arguement was that I was cutting across the slope, even though she was above me, I have the right of way.
Skiers look straight down the hill, snowbaorders look from side to side and we don’t have eyes in the back of our heads.
It’s comparable to someone trying to blame you when they rear end you in a car.
wonder if snowboarders sitting in the trail are factored in.
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