Is professional freeride skiing just too dangerous?

Matilda Rapaport, the Swedish skier who died from her injuries on July 18 after being caught in an avalanche while filming in Chile, was just 30.

She was at the top of her game, a professional freerider for over 10 years, having made the jump from ski racing. She competed on the Freeride World Tour in venues from Austria to Alaska and ranked fourth in the world; she also starred in ski films including the all-female Shades of Winter, Pure and upcoming Between. At the time of her death she was filming for the forthcoming extreme sport video game Steep.

Many tributes have been posted by her peers, by organisations such as the International Ski Federation and Eurosport, magazines that have featured her on their covers, her sponsors such as Peak Performance, Red Bull and GoPro, and the wide audience who’ve admired her in films and at events. “So sad,” said American big mountain skier and adventurer Chris Davenport on Twitter, summing up the mood.

Life on the edge

Rapaport was one of an elite band of extreme skiers and snowboarders who perform breath-taking descents in remote locations for the movies and video clips that fuel the aspirations of holiday skiers and snowboarders – for both perfect snow and perfect turns. The pros flow down sheer faces that most of us could never dream of tackling, and travel the world creating video and photography that’s streamed and shared avidly by an audience with a seemingly bottomless appetite for the next beautiful line – and biggest, craziest achievement.

Whether they’re filming, taking part in events or freeriding for themselves, these athletes are professionals who know the risks of their sport. They wear a transceiver, carry shovel and probe, follow the advice of safety experts – and when filming or at an event, helicopters and recue crew are with them, on high alert. Many athletes wear an airbag backpack that can help carry them on the surface of an avalanche – it’s a condition of taking part in the Freeride World Tour, for example.

But despite all this, Rapaport is not the only top-flight athlete to die before her time in recent years. In April Estelle Balet, the Swiss snowboarder who had just been crowned champion at this year’s Freeride World Tour, was killed while filming in Switzerland. She was 21.

In 2014 Canadian freeski pioneer and co-founder of Armada skis JP Auclair was killed by an avalanche in Chile, shortly after his 37th birthday, alongside 31-year-old Swedish skier Andreas Fransson.

Pressure to perform?

Last December American ski magazine Powder ran a feature entitled The End Game, considering the line athletes have to walk between risk and the reward that comes from giving their audience and their sponsors what they crave – a video that goes viral for example. Writer Matt Hansen says, “One of the most widely held views in action sports is that professional athletes do what they do because they love it, and they’d be doing it regardless of financial reward. Risk mitigation, athletes say, is part of the job.” But he also lays out how the growing influence of social media has “placed an unprecedented amount of pressure on athletes to perform”, explaining that “While film shoots typically include guides and snow-safety experts, skiers still know that if they don’t drop in – and share the footage – someone else will.”

It’s not only the deaths that emphasise the risks that riders run as part of their job, but the close calls and injuries.

In March British snowboarder Sascha Hamm, who had an extremely good chance of finishing near the top of the table in the 2016 Freeride World Tour, crashed out of the event in Fieberbrunn, Austria, with serious – though not life-threatening – shoulder, arm and leg injuries.

Famed French snowboarder Xavier De Le Rue was caught in an avalanche in 2008, while filming in Switzerland with Swedish skier Henrik Windstedt. De Le Rue was wearing an airbag, but was tumbled through the snow for two kilometres and considers himself extremely lucky to have survived. “It’s been a close call,” he said. “There are times when having the best gear (beacon transceiver, probes, shovel, mountain guide, ABS backpack…) and the best technique doesn’t help much any more. Good to keep that in mind.” While it wasn’t long before De Le Rue was back on snow, the avalanche changed his attitude to risk: “There are two sides to it,” he said. “What you yourself do, and the conditions. I can’t control the conditions and it’s important to be able to say no if they aren’t right.”

Safety is paramount

Pro skier and head ski guide for the Swatch Skiers Cup in Zermatt in 2013, Sam Anthamatten, says similar, stressing that no matter how much planning has gone into an event or descent, it can always be cancelled. “You might decide to call it off at any point. I’ve made that decision so many times I can’t remember. You need to have the strength to walk away. To say yes is easy, no is much harder.” In 2013 Anthamattan decided to end the big mountain leg of the Skiers Cup early for safety reasons.

I witnessed the same attention to safety when I was at the Haines leg of the Freeride World Tour in February. A window of 10 days is allowed for this event to go ahead, because the weather is so changeable in Alaska. The world’s top freeride skiers and snowboarders, plus an army of organisers and technicians, ship out to this remote part of the world. A “village” is built from nothing at the top of a mountain, with every person and piece of equipment flown in by helicopter, so that the competition can be filmed and streamed to the world as it happens. And yet, if the safety experts said the riders would be unsafe, the event would not go ahead.

In response to Rapaport’s death, Freeride World Tour CEO Nicolas Hale-Woods said, “The mountains are an environment where the utmost security cannot guarantee anything – that is very clear from the last 200 years of mountaineering and skiing. Some of the best, at the pinnacle of their career, have died in the mountains. We do everything we can, having a number of safety professionals on hand, sometimes weeks in advance, to minimise risk and to react in the fastest way if accidents happen – but we know that zero risk does not exist.”

The sport will go on

American skier Jaclyn Paaso, another star of the Freeride World Tour, ranked second in the world, said on Instagram: “It really makes you think, two friends in three months. Is this sport we all love really worth it? At the same time I'll never stop playing in the mountains, it's what I and all my friends live for.”

Rapaport herself was caught in an avalanche in Alaska in 2014, which she talked about candidly in her contribution to the Peak Performance video series A Skier Knows, and it didn’t stop her skiing. The following year she returned to Alaska, saying, “You know I had a lot of bad memories from last year, and coming back I create new ones, and a lot of really good memories.”

She also talks about why she pushes herself – and it has nothing to do with social media. “What I really want to do when I ski is exceed expectations, and especially my own expectations of what I’m capable of. That’s always been something that drives me, to push my limits and ski harder and faster than before.”

The challenge is to make this as safe as possible.

Hale-Woods is hopeful that Rapaport and Balet’s deaths will bring action that improves the safety of riders. “In general as humans we progress when it hurts, and it hurts a lot these past weeks. We have to strive to progress and bring together the riders and industry to think about what kind of additional gear we could develop in the future. We at Freeride World Tour feel that we have a responsibility to initiate this dialogue, to think outside the box, to put in more resources. There are two aspects. Ideally you don’t get caught – even the best safety experts can still be totally surprised by an avalanche happening naturally. The second is rescue technology, both your own gear or the people rescuing you. I’m not sure where it will go, but we will be trying to work together. There must be some possible progress.”