Asketh Auntie Beeb: Should ski helmets be compulsory?

Replieth this fella: Hell no.

It is, of course, tragic that someone has died. It is tragic that they’ve lost their life while indulging in a seemingly innocuous pass time. It is tragic that they’ve left behind a family who’ll be lost without them.

However, it does not mean that laws and/or rules should be brought in. I’ll wager that more people die of head injuries in car accidents in the UK every month than die due to head injuries skiing worldwide in a year. You might as well tell cross country runners to wear helmets.

The helmet thing in skiing perplexes me. I used to go skiing every year up until about ’97, and I can’t remember ever seeing anyone wearing a helmet outside of specialist nutjob freestyle competitions. When I went back to the slopes at the start of ’07, all of a sudden maybe one in ten were wearing them. Where did these hundred, nay thousands of folk come from? Did they look at competition skiing and think that they were in the same league as the competitors? Did they look at the odds and decide that they were the one in a million that would benefit from it?

Bah. The way I see it, unless you’re going to be doing something absolutely bonkers (cliff jumping, downhill racing for X-game style tricks), a helmet is just something that’ll give you a false sense of security. And thusly it should be left at home, with the motorcycle…