“How’s the knee?” he asked. “It’s been what, two years?”
“Springtime before last. I’m over it.”
“I thought they taught all you guys how to fall now, to prevent that.”
“This one was out of my control. I stuffed a tip into a powder bump and left that ski behind. Then I tumbled. About the third rotation I landed in the back seat. Felt it pop. It was a heavy late-spring storm. I had the summer to rehab.”
“I don’t know anyone who works here, over the age of 30, who hasn’t done it,” Slats said.
“I don’t either, unless they don’t ski.”
“How many knees get popped each winter?”
“My doc said 25,000.”
“You know, this is one of the ways the sport has changed. In the ’50s, we broke ankles at about this rate, and the industry fixed it. It took 20 years, but eventually Gordon Lipe made enough noise that we got good bindings. Then we got plastic boots with standard soles, and the problem went away. Well, 95 percent away. But no one wants to fix the ACL problem.”
“I would, if I knew how.”
“Well, problem is, the guys who could don’t want to.”
“Oh, come on.”
“True,” said Slats. “Who has an incentive to prevent ACL injuries?”
“Umm, the surgeons?”
“Nope. If they do 25,000 skier knees a year, at about $25,000 per, that’s two-thirds of a billion dollars. Why would the orthopods want to kill that goose? Besides, it’s low-risk business. The patients are essentially healthy and motivated to rehab quickly, so the outcome is almost always great, give or take a little tendonitis. Knee docs are heroes. If they didn’t have knees to work on, they’d have to fix little old ladies with bad hips. Not nearly as much fun.”
“The binding companies?”
“Wrong. Ever since the ASTM and DIN standards came in, they’ve been selling the idea that the knee isn’t their problem. The standards don’t mention torques at the knee, so, legally, they’re correct. The knee is off their radar, out of their jurisdiction, and aufgepiste, by about 10 inches. Besides, if one of them suddenly introduced a binding that protects the knee, they’d look like tobacco industry executives. It would be like saying, ‘Oops, my bad.’ ”
“What about retailers and resorts? If surgery is taking half a billion out of their customers’ wallets, isn’t that money that should have been spent on gear, clothing and tickets?”
“You would think. Let’s say the average knee injury puts the skier out for half a season. For the average skier, that’s six or eight days, or about 175,000 skier days a year if you look at it nationally. And that’s not much, really—only about one skier day in 300.
“The problem is that we don’t know how many of those people simply drop out for good. We don’t know how many lifelong skiers it costs us. If one third of them go away and never come back, that’s 8,000 drop-outs a year, and if each of those dropouts would have been good for ten days a year for another ten years, that’s 800,000 skier days lost for each year we keep trashing knees. After a decade, you’ve chased off people who would have added eight million skier days to this year’s business. That would have represented about 15 percent growth, I think. But hell, I’m no Isaac Newton. You do the math. No one else does.”
“Someone must care.”
“Maybe the resort’s risk manager. But he can’t do much besides talk.”
“What do you mean?”
“Let’s assume I run a ski area, and I have a staff of patrollers and instructors and lifties. Let’s say these folks suffer, among them, a dozen work-related ACL ruptures in the course of the winter. That’s almost $300,000 in medical bills against the workmen’s comp budget, plus their lost time—let’s say an average of 30 days each, or 360 days of medical leave. Now, for a marginal business, we’re talking real money. I think I might want to eliminate those injuries. But . . .”
“But what?”
“I don’t have a research and engineering budget, do I?”
“Well, someone does.”
“Yes, but when I tell ski and boot and binding vendors that they need to fix this problem, they say people don’t buy boots with releasing spoilers. They don’t buy bindings that pre-release when you load the tail. They don’t buy skis with soft or narrow tails. The factories haven’t ignored the problem in the past, but they also don’t want to revisit products that flopped 10 or 20 years ago.
“Anyway, if you were to build that stuff again, the last guys who’d buy into it are the hot-shot skiers who work at the resorts. To get them to use the stuff, you’d have to buy it for them and forbid them to ski on anything else, and who has the budget or the balls to do that?”
“Well, they do teach us to fall forward.”
“Happy landings.”
