Quote:
Originally Posted by raymond
The latest figures I saw showed that FISHING was the most dangerous sport in NZ with a number of fatalities
|
Ah, but there is no governing body for fishing in NZ (MoF and Fish & Game don't count) and although there are organized events, the bulk of fishing deaths occur with stupid people either fishing alone off rocks (no spotter) or in overcorwded boats with no lifejackets.
If you took casual racing into account (i.e. boy racers on public roads) the toll would be somewhat higher. Expand that to idiots who think they are on a racetrack while on the road and it would go higher again. But is not a valid argument against motorsport as they are uncontrolled activities.
Sport by its nature is dangerous, so the maximum effort must be made to ensure the safety of its competitors (hence the recent ban on various tackles in League).
In motorsport the risks are high due to speeds, but this can be mitigated by the use of safe circuits and safe cars. It is worth noting that despite some pretty horrific crashes in F1 there have been no deaths since Ayrton Senna, which is pretty amazing. This is partly due to circuit design and partly due to robust car design.
Whilst forcing extreme safety measures to all levels of motorsport would be prohibitively expensive, there are no doubt still plenty of things that can be done to both cars and circuits to minimize as much as possible the risk of injury or death if an accident does occur.
Technology moves quickly and it would be wise to move with it.
Bikes, unfortunately are inherently dangerous and short of some sort of suit of armour like the "bear proof suit" I don't know how much can be done to protect riders from being struck when they come off or being injured when their bodies hit something at speed (other than maximising the flat distance able to be travelled - run off area - from the apex of any corner).