Interesting. Mine has a GoPro mount built right into the helmet.

There was a full face bike helmet doing the rounds a while back that had a particularly square jawed front.
It was banned from downhill skateboarding events because of the risk of the face of the helmet catching the ground on a corner and snapping your neck.

Everybody knows the best place for a Go Pro is either on a stick, or attached to the gimbal of a $1000 quad-rotor drone

Yeah, my mate's got one of those sticks for his go pro.

Well if I wanted to stay 100% safe I would not ski, snowmobile, etc etc

So for me I dont have one, plan to get one and if compusory in a country would not chose to ski there

well, it's question of mitigating risk for inconvenience.

OK, story time. I was boarding one day down a standard blue slope - none of your off piste stuff, not tricky at all, and I managed to hit a rut at just the wrong angle at just the wrong time and the effect was to throw my board and feet up into the air 'toes' first'. Obviously, with physics & all, that caused my head and shoulders to head groundwards at speed. I actually landed broadly across my shoulders which was fine, but my head carried on and 'whiplashed' into the surface. EVEN WEARING A HELMET, on snow, I was seeing stars and felt pretty bad for a couple of days. if I hadn't been wearing a helmet, I'd probably have had a fractured skull. And that was on a well kept blue slope at pretty low speed. No matter how good you are, at some point you're going to come a cropper, that's just the reality. You're basically saying 'I am never going to come a cropper in a way that my head could possibly be at any serious risk'.

Wearing a helmet is a question of risk vs convenience. I find wearing a helmet mildly inconvenient - my hair gets all sweaty, I feel slightly claustrophobic about it.. but the bare fact is you don't need to be doing what Schumacher was doing or what the Freestyle olympic types do for slope sports to turn around and bite you.

Skiing or boarding without a helmet is your choice. Just like crossing the road when the pedestrian crossing light is on red would be your choice. I wouldn't do either.

For me, I didn't like wearing a helmet for downhill skating.
Then I realised I enjoyed skating.
Giving myself nasty head injuries and knee injuries (it's bad enough without impact injuries) meant I couldn't carry on enjoying it because I'd have to spend time healing.
So you wear the gear because it means less time waiting to heal and more time actually doing the thing you enjoy.
The 'oh I'll never skate/ski/board with one' actually just kinda tells me you don't actually enjoy doing it that much. The frisson of danger you may enjoy is, ultimately, posturing.

Helmets have changed dramatically in the past couple of years. The best ones are extremely light, offer superb venting and after the first day of wear, you pretty much forget that it's there.

I love having my hair flapping in the breeze as much as the next guy, but when I'm regularly hitting 60mph on two bits of titanium reinforced wood covered in fibreglass, you have to ask yourself - isn't it amazing that I don't need MORE protection than just a helmet.

Last season, I hit a wall of ice at less than 30mph when another skier cut across me and clipped my skis. I broke my glasses and was out of it for the rest of the day and into the next. The hit occurred on the side of my head. Things could've been a lot worse.

I swear by mine, but I suppose it depends how you ski. Seeing 150 British skiers every week gives you quite a perspective and IMO people have forgotten that it's an adrenaline sport. They seem to think it's just like golf or some other innocuous sport. It's not - not if it's done properly.

I would (naturally) disagree. I refuse to wrap myself up in cotton wool. I am happy to assess the risks in a sport and then take the action I need to bring the risks down to an acceptable level.

I also think it a generational thing - take cycling - I also dont wear a helmet for that as it was not done when I was young and so I dont do it now and if they were not compulsory on motorcycles I would probably only wear one about 80% of the time (and I have had more than 1 accident on a motorcycle and a helmet have saved me a nasty accident at least once)

Also as a rule of thumb as a libertarian I dont belive that the state should mandate personal safety (e.g. Helmets) - afterall I am sure I could come up with a very good case to mandate the wearing of wellies when its raining

I used to wear less but these days I wear a helmet, a pair of wrist protectors and some impact shorts. As has been argued earlier, I've got to the point where I think wearing the odd bit of protective gear is less of a hassle than spending a chunk of slope time sitting around because of a concussion or some such.


I'd imagine the number of people being seriously injured by stepping in a puddle is vanishingly small. People get helicoptered off the slopes in a stretcher more often. TBH, even if the state doesn't, I'm kind of surprised that holiday/skiing insurance these days doesn't mandate at least some level of protection as part of the policy.

The argument surely is this : If the cost of treating a potential injury could be very large and the possibility of that injury happening is if not significant then at least non-trivial the person bearing that risk on your behalf has some justification in asking you to mitigate that risk.

If the alternative was to possibly face the bill for recovery, a hospital stay and maybe even some sort of surgery on fractured skull or jaw, most people would say 'Yeah, you know what, I'll just wear the helmet'.

Nothing to do with the state, just the personal realisation that:
A: do really enjoy doing this activity?
B: assuming I do, what are the measures I can take to ensure I can keep doing this as long as possible?
C: wear the appropriate equipment that keeps me up and able to enjoy said activity.

It's a logical process, nothing to do with a nanny state. I will wear the equipment that means I can walk away and carry on doing my chosen thing the next day, rather than being laid up wishing I'd worn the pads/helmet. I've had 6 weeks off my feet with 90% of the soft tissue in my knee being torn up. Had I been wearing pads at the time, I'd probably have been skating for 6 weeks longer. Not rocket science in terms of a cost/benefits type of transaction.
Nothing to do with the state, everything to do with smart choices.

Helmet arrived, tried it on, it's too small.
Sending it back on Monday. They don't do a larger size either.

Sucks

Rubbish! So what are you gonna get now?

The Schoph goggles and a normal open face helmet. I've ordered the goggles, but I'll get the helmet after crimbo.