An astute listener to “Con Games with Michael Conniff: writes:
I’m sure you didn’t know of this or it would have been mentioned on the show today, but Sarah Burke (arguably one of the best female skiers ever) broke her back at this years xgames in the slopestyle also the crash that gretchen took in the pipe was really not out of the ordinary in snowboarding.  that exact same thing (the whiplash) happens tens of times on the 4 mountains of aspen every single day, but its not replayed in super slow motion so you never see that whip back of the head.  What do you think happens when a beginner on snowmass catches a heel edge and gets slammed to the ground on there back?  With Gretchen’s crash, at least 50% of the energy that she was carrying was dissipated when she hit the lip, then she slid to the bottom on the transition dissipating even more only to flip over at the very bottom when she was not really going that fast..  if the pipe had been smaller she would have hit the lip then landed in the bottom of the pipe and more than likely she would have taken a sled ride to the ER.
 

suggesting that these sports be governed by national laws is so completely absurd that i cant even imagine that you mentioned something like that, talk about a Nanny State…  Without people pushing the limits of what we think is possible, humanity would be regressing and we would have never seen the advances that we have seen in the past 50+ years.   These are professional athletes.  Should we say that track and field runners be limited to 10 second 100m dashes because if they try to run faster they might hurt themselves?  should football players be only allowed to run 15 seconds at a time before taking a mandatory 1 min break?  Professional athletes are not like the general population, they are driven, competitive, successful and paid well for what they do.  Winning at the xgames= $30,000 in prize money + more than triple that in endorsements and matching incentives.   Everyone competing knows what they are doing to the point that its second nature to them to drop into a 22′ tall halfpipe, did gretchen or any of the competitors look scared to you when launching 20′ out  of the 22′ tall pipe?   no, they made it look easy.
Enacting laws to limit what they can do, with the sole purpose of limiting them and wanting to bring them back to the level of the lazy couch surfer in america is appalling.