Has skiing become too fast and too furious?

Once the sport of the leisured elite, overcrowded slopes, drunk rookies and a need for speed mean even experienced skiers are at risk

For many of us, it is the high point of winter – that moment when you find yourself on top of a mountain. The glare of sun on snow stings the naked eye and the snow itself is so crisp and deep that it’s tempting to roll in it like a terrier puppy. Instead, you click into your boots and – swoosh! – off you go, slip-sliding away. The hassle and expense of getting to this point are finally worth it. It’s a moment of pure freedom and elation.
But for Edward Bunn, one day last season, the exhilaration was short-lived. Bunn, 62, the co-director of Hickstead showjumping ground in West Sussex, wasn’t even skiing when he was hit. He was at the foot of a run at Courchevel 1650, about to get on a chairlift, when a skier came so close at speed that it clipped his ski and knocked him over, causing him to land on his arm, fracturing the humerus. ‘He didn’t even stop or offer help,’ says Bunn. ‘I’ve been skiing for 50 years and that was my first injury. He just came from nowhere and should have been going a lot slower into a lift queue.’
This is just one of the more than 24,000 incidents that took place during the 2022-23 winter season in France – which many report was one of the worst yet. Not for conditions, but for the behaviour of others skiing recklessly on the slopes, even – some say, especially – on the nursery slopes. ‘There’s a lack of respect for other people’s space,’ says Bunn. ‘You see way too many people out of control and going too fast.’
In many ways, Bunn was lucky. In January 2022, a five-year-old British girl was killed by an out-of-control skier ploughing into her in Flaine, Chamonix. The 40-year-old Frenchman was charged with manslaughter after he failed at speed to avoid the girl. Four days later, at La Rosière, the French actor Gaspard Ulliel, who played Hannibal Lecter in Hannibal Rising, lost his life aged 37 after colliding with someone on a blue run and hitting his head. 
The coroner ruled there were no adverse weather conditions, or rocks around, but noted Ulliel was not wearing a helmet. Four days after that, a 21-year-old cook at Val d’Isère died when he skied into a snow plough. Most recently, on 27 December, two Britons were killed in an avalanche in the Mont Blanc mountain range; reportedly set off by skiers higher up the slopes. 
Then there are the accidents which, while not fatal, are costly. One thinks of Gwyneth Paltrow’s collision with retired optometrist Terry Sanderson on the slopes of Park City, Utah, in January 2016; a crash that led to Sanderson suing Paltrow for $300,000. Paltrow defended herself, and the jury at the trial last March acquitted her, finding holes in his claim that Paltrow was to blame for the ‘life-changing injuries’ he had sustained.
We’ll return to Paltrow shortly, but first, the data. It is accepted that skiing has an element of danger. But is it getting more dangerous? Yes, according to figures collected by the Système National d’Observation de la Sécurité en Montagne from 52 ski resorts, which show there has been an increase in collisions on French slopes. 
In the winter of 2017-18 there were 21,361 call-outs to accidents on the slopes, and 20,919 injuries. Last winter, the number of call-outs was up 14 per cent to 24,334 and the number of injuries rose 15 per cent to 24,132. 
But the figures don’t tell the whole story, says Cédric Bonnevie, director of the slopes authority at Val d’Isère, who points out that most collisions go unreported. His team of ‘pisteurs’ are the people in red coats who come whizzing out to help in the event of an accident. 
‘The work we have to do is more about the feeling of insecurity out there rather than really the number of rescues and in particular the number of collisions,’ he tells me. We’re sitting in rescue HQ at the foot of the Solaise ski area. A thick carpet of fresh snow stretches in every direction and the peaks of the mountains are shrouded in cloud. Six pisteurs have just set off on a rescue mission, though the lifts are mostly empty, the resort having only opened two days earlier.
Bonnevie, 45, is lean and tall with a slightly mischievous air, as if he needs answer to no one. It turns out that is the case: unlike most French resorts, the pisteurs at Val d’Isère are not run by a private company but are state-controlled, which he says gives them freedom to carry out their work independently. 
Bonnevie was formerly a ski instructor before taking on the job of heading up Val d’Isère’s army of pisteurs a decade ago. While he admits there is a problem with out-of-control skiers, he adopts a metaphorical Gallic shrug when it comes to what should be done about it. ‘Skiing is all about freedom,’ he says. ‘But it’s true something has changed – maybe that’s to do with the behaviour of people who have less respect. I think it’s true of society in general.’
It is a shift in attitude that many seasoned skiers have been complaining about lately. Take Lauren Polson, a wedding photographer from Aberdeenshire. ‘I’ve skied for more than 20 years and previously worked in the Alps, and never seen it so bad,’ she wrote on the Planet Ski website when it reported a rise in injuries last year. ‘We were in Val Thorens for a week last winter trying to learn to snowboard but half the battle was fighting for space on the green slopes and trying to avoid out-of-control skiers.’
For Lacey Dorn, 34, an actor from New York, normal life was altered after she was rammed on the slopes of Taos, New Mexico, in January 2023. She describes herself as an expert skier and spends every winter in the mountains. One day she was out with two male friends when one of them showed off, ended up losing control and smashed into her, causing Dorn to black out. ‘As it was happening, I thought I was going to die,’ she says now. 
‘He slammed into me at the speed of a car. It was such a hard impact that I was shaking for four hours afterwards.’ Dorn has spent the past year in and out of hospital and, despite having health insurance, has spent a fortune on medical treatment. ‘My friends tell me I’m on a completely different planet. The awful thing is that this is quite normal for cases of concussion. I’m not a peculiar case.’
And it’s not just the crash victims who are struggling. Dr Jean-Jacques Banihachemi, head of A&E at the Hôpital Sud in Grenoble, commented last March that his department was in a ‘catastrophic’ situation due to the volume of skiers being admitted, up to 100 per day. 
Speaking to the radio network FranceInfo, he noted an increase in femoral neck fractures, knee and leg fractures. ‘You have to pay attention to your speed, it is a very important factor in the cause of accidents,’ he said. ‘You have to know a minimum of the mountain code, how to ski and what priorities to give on the slopes.’
Historically, the majority of injuries caused by skiing had been to the lower body, according to research published by the National Library of Medicine, which analysed data compiled between 1985 and 2018. Knee injuries were most common at 32 per cent, while head and neck injuries accounted for just 13 per cent.
As Dr Banihachemi notes, one problem is that the question of ‘right of way’ is often overlooked. The ‘10 Rules of Good Conduct on the Slopes’ on the Val d’Isère website, which follows the guidance issued by the International Ski and Snowboard Federation, state the uphill skier is responsible for avoiding those downhill. ‘Anyone below the skier has priority… The skier who’s further uphill [on the mountain side] has a position that lets them choose their trajectory. So they must make their choice in such a way as to ensure the safety of anyone who is further down the slope [on the valley side].’
But the question of who is to blame is rarely easy to prove. A Discovery+ documentary about the Gwyneth Paltrow incident, Gwyneth vs Terry: The Ski Crash Trial, showed how jurors were faced with a classic ‘he-said-she-said’ case as there was no footage of the incident, and only the testimony of two witnesses. 
Eric Christiansen, who was Paltrow’s son Moses Martin’s ski instructor, was one of the witnesses. He described her as a ‘strong intermediate skier’ who tended to stick to the right side of the slope so that faster skiers behind her could overtake.
‘Unless you’ve got GoPro footage, it’s incredibly difficult to prove blame in a ski crash,’ says the documentary’s director Marcus English. ‘This is the inherent risk of skiing, that you may get injured. That’s what made this case so interesting: you’ve got this little guy taking on a huge Hollywood star. It’s very rare for a civilian to successfully sue all the way to court. In the end the jury sided with Gwyneth but I genuinely felt that both sides had a compelling case and legal argument.’
According to Bonnevie, people often flee the scene of a ski collision. ‘I’m afraid we see that all the time,’ he says. Sanderson had accused Paltrow of skiing away after the incident, but Paltrow and Christiansen’s testimony claimed that it was Sanderson who crashed into Paltrow, and that the star was so affected by the incident that she stopped skiing for the day. ‘We’re called out to an incident and by the time we get there, one of them has gone,’ says Bonnevie.
Bonnevie’s main theory as to why ski crashes are on the rise is that modern skis have evolved too far to be used safely by beginners. ‘In the past, you had these big skis which were harder to turn, and so only skilled skiers could go on the black runs,’ he says. 
‘Now, the material and design of the skis have evolved a lot, which makes them much easier to turn. This allows less competent skiers to go faster than their capacity, so you’ll see them zooming along the nursery slopes at much faster speeds than they should.’ Specifically the development of sharper edges has made skis easier to turn in the snow; sharper, lighter skis also allow a faster build up of speed.
Taking my life into my hands, I head out on to the slopes to see what’s really going on. The first skiers I speak to are a young couple from Chester, Cody Silvester, 31, and his girlfriend Rhian Mason, 27. ‘I was run into the very first time I went skiing,’ says Mason. ‘So I always wear a helmet. It could save your life.’ 
But Silvester, who has been skiing all his life, disagrees. ‘I never wear a helmet and never would. It just feels wrong; it makes you feel top-heavy. Yes, if I was doing extreme off-piste skiing, I’d consider it. But not here, doing just regular skiing.’ What, I wonder, would he do if French resorts made headgear compulsory? ‘I’d go elsewhere,’ he replies. ‘I don’t even like wearing a motorbike helmet.’
I stand in the middle of the piste and count how many people are wearing helmets. One in six are not. When I raise the subject with Bonnevie, expecting him to say they should be made mandatory, he suggests that helmets could be part of the problem. ‘They can make you feel invincible,’ he says. ‘I always make my children wear one, but equally it’s true that we notice among some skiers, when wearing a helmet, this feeling of being isolated and being able to hear less.’ This ties in with the notion that skiers sometimes listen to music or podcasts while they ski, about which there are no rules.
In fact, skiing is remarkably unregulated, especially in France. Last year, Italy’s far-Right government introduced new laws for skiers, including mandatory helmets for under-18s, zero tolerance for alcohol or drug use, and compulsory third-party insurance for all. In the US, there is regular supervision of the slopes, with spot-checks, breathalysing, and the ability of stewards to confiscate a ski pass of anyone skiing out of control. 
But in France no such rules exist. When I ask Bonnevie if helmets will ever be mandatory in France, there is more metaphorical shrugging of those shoulders. ‘If you had asked me that 10 years ago, I would have said yes,’ he says. ‘But now it’s not so clear. And if we were to introduce such a rule, how would you police it? That’s also very difficult.’
One reason why resorts may be reluctant to introduce tighter regulations is that they are already grappling with the consequences of climate change. Seasons are shorter and less reliable. At lower-altitude resorts (those below 1,600m), lack of snowfall is the problem, while at higher ones such as Tignes, next door to Val d’Isère, the melting of the glacier is to blame.
The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that Alpine glaciers will have all but vanished by the end of this century, having lost 94 per cent of their 2017 volume by 2100. With such a depressing future, who can blame French resorts for keeping the vin chaud flowing? Bonnevie says that if anything, the slopes have become less regulated. ‘There used to be ski patrollers with special outfits here on the slopes, but not any more. It didn’t really work.’
Out on the mountainside, people are taking their own precautions. ‘I’ve been skiing 20 years but I’ve always worn a helmet,’ says Andrew Steane, 62, from Skipton, Yorkshire. ‘I think it’s a generational thing. You get these older posh people who have never worn a helmet because it wasn’t what you did back then. But they’re the only people I would say who don’t wear one.’
For Steane, choosing the right resort also makes a difference. ‘In terms of behaviour on the slopes, it’s all to do with where the [drinks] bar is,’ he says. ‘In Val d’Isère the bar’s at the bottom of the slope, so you’re fine, but in Ischgl in Austria the bar’s halfway up the slope. Once people have had a few they can be unsteady on their feet, let alone skis. I did hear talk of them introducing breathalysing on the slopes; that would have an effect because if you are found to be under the influence of alcohol it may invalidate your insurance.’
Dominique Bonnier, 65, is from Aix-en-Provence and has been skiing at Val d’Isère for 50 years. He agrees that behaviour depends on the resort. ‘Here, people are of a pretty high standard, and it’s mainly English people who are civilised skiers. Whereas the Italians are rude. At Courchevel, there are more green and blue runs and you’ll get people behaving badly. But you don’t get that here, it’s too hard, there are no easy runs.’
The onus should be on more experienced skiers to behave better, says Linsey Warren, 34, from London. ‘I think it’s the more experienced people who are the problem,’ she says. ‘They don’t realise that us beginners sometimes can’t stop when we want to.’ Her partner Neil Henderson, 38, agrees. ‘They’ll see a little gap and just slip through it. I think they should be more respectful to beginners.’
Dive into the world of online ski forums and the theories about worsening behaviour are myriad. Some blame resorts for not controlling crowd sizes. But Bonnevie queries this. ‘We actually find that during the school holidays, when the slopes are very crowded, we get fewer accidents, because people are being more careful,’ he explains. 
‘It’s in between the holidays that we see more accidents, when the slopes are emptier’ and groups of friends may feel particularly free. He notes Wednesday is often the big day for accidents: once people have got their ‘ski legs’ back and start to take bigger risks.
So is there anything that can be done to make skiing safer? By the time I leave Bonnevie, he has warmed to this theme. ‘You know, that cook who died in Val d’Isère, he was using an app that monitored his performance,’ he says. ‘So it’s not just other people who cause accidents. People can push themselves too far and sometimes technology is to blame.’
There it is again, that resignation in his voice, as if to say, ‘What do you expect? Skiing is dangerous.’ He’s right, of course, it is. I leave him and step out into the cold, where it has started to snow. I’d half-thought of squeezing in a couple of runs after our interview, but I look up and see that all around us the mountains are shrouded in cloud – the weather is closing in. A shiver runs down my spine and I suddenly feel ready to return home.