Extreme Sports Risk Management

Extreme sports risk management is not a new sport involving assessing risk while rappelling down a mountain. What I’m talking about is risk management for extreme sports, such as skateboarding, surfing, mountain biking, mountain climbing, bungee jumping and many other popular adventure sports that seemingly involve more risk than traditional sports, such as baseball, tennis and volleyball. One of the goals that we have at Nohr Sports Risk Management, LLC is to focus on extreme sports just as much or more than we do on traditional sports, because we feel that this segment of sports and recreation is underserved and is growing.

It seems to me that the more extreme the risk of a sport is, the more its participants are focused on safety. For example, in sky diving, participants use secondary parachutes that are professionally packed and newcomers are generally required to watch safety videos before participating in their first jump that is almost always in tandem with another skydiver. You would never see this kind of care in most sports. It seems that mountain climbers also adhere to more strict safety rules and put more of their energy into safety measures than athletes that perform their sport on the ground. Is this because the more likely that a mistake will lead to death, the more cognizant the participants of the sport are in ensuring safety?

In researching my book, Managing Risk in Sport and Recreation: The Essential Guide for Loss Prevention (2009) Human Kinetics, although I did not focus on extreme sports, I did note that there were more published appellate court decisions in golf than any other sport that I addressed. Of course, golf involves errant balls, swinging clubs, trip hazards, houses adjacent to golf courses, the 19th hole, golf carts, and water hazards and so there are bound to be injuries from a variety of sources. As extreme sports find their place in American jurisprudence, I’ll be reporting on any interesting appellate court decisions that I become aware of. In the meantime, wear your helmet and adhere to all applicable safety rules.