The Danger to Competitors in Sport: A Problem Beyond the Elite

In the wake of the Olympic Games, winter sports enter a phase of reflection. Stakeholders look to harness public attention, enhance engagement, and develop the next generation of talent. But the practical reality of athlete development is that it happens largely away from the televised stage: in training blocks, camps and lower- category events. That is where the organisational challenge lies. If safety standards and oversight mechanisms remain concentrated at elite competitions, the expansion of participation and development will inevitably widen the gap between risk exposure and risk protection.

This piece uses skiing and motorsport as case studies to show how safety standards tighten at the elite level but loosen in training and lower-tier competition, why that gap exists, and what regulators can do to reduce the risk of serious injury.

Unequal Safety Standards in Sport

At the top of the sporting pyramid, infrastructure is designed to manage risk. Courses and circuits are inspected, barriers are positioned to mitigate impact, run-off areas are measured, and medical teams stand ready. This is the result of binding regulations, insurance requirements, and commercial imperatives tied to elite competition.

Outside the spotlight, the picture changes dramatically. At training camps and lower- category events, where many athletes spend most of their time, safety measures are often minimal, outdated, or entirely absent. The risk to participants, however, does not change. The human body does not move more slowly or less forcefully simply because an event lacks television coverage or a title sponsor. A collision at high speed in a training environment is just as devastating as it would be at the Olympics or in any top-tier event.

This uneven landscape is precisely where tragedies tend to occur. Matilde Lorenzi’s fatal fall occurred at the end of a descent, in a section not considered particularly dangerous, yet no safety barrier had been placed there. Matteo Franzoso suffered a fatal head injury after crashing through safety netting and hitting a fence not far away from the training piste. These incidents expose a regulatory gap that is both obvious and preventable: many sporting safety systems are strongest only where the governing body’s jurisdictional levers are strongest (elite competition), and weaker where athletes train and develop (the base of the pyramid).

Skiing: Strong Rules, Weak Reach

The Fédération Internationale de Ski et de Snowboard (FIS) has developed some of the most technically detailed safety regulations in sport. Its International Competition Rules (ICR) for Alpine Skiing, set out protective measures required for events in the FIS calendar, such as the Alpine Ski World Cup.

Article 702.3 of the ICR provides that obstacles against which competitors may be thrown “should be as well protected as possible with high safety nets, safety fences, pads or similar means if necessary, together with slip-sheets.” This provision
establishes a clear expectation that dangerous areas must be properly safeguarded. However, while the word “should” establishes a default duty, the phrases “as possible” and “if necessary” introduce an element of discretion to event organisers. This flexibility, which hinges on the organiser’s judgment of feasibility and hazard level, can result in uneven and, at times, dangerously inadequate levels of protection; particularly where the rule is not reinforced by strong oversight and inspection mechanisms.

The subsequent provisions of the ICR set out how these protections are to be implemented and monitored in formal competitions and official training sessions (which are normally conducted the days prior to the official competition). Article 703.2.1 requires protective installations to be in place before the Jury inspection for Downhill events. The Jury is the panel of technical officials appointed by FIS and the race organiser to supervise the race, assess whether the course and safety installations comply with the ICR, and, where necessary, require changes before training or racing can begin. Article 703.2.2 adds that, “before the start of training on the first official training day, there must be an inspection by the Jury with the technical advisor, if present, and generally also in the presence of the team captains or trainers.” In addition, Article 704.4 requires the presence of adequate medical services during official training sessions.

Together, these provisions create a comprehensive regulatory structure for events in the FIS calendar: homologation of courses, installation of multiple net layers and padding in high-risk areas, and formal inspections before training and racing. Yet, this structure only applies to competition courses and official training linked to those FIS calendar events. It therefore does not govern by default pre-season training camps or lower-category races (for example, regional junior events sanctioned at national level), even though these are where many athletes spend most of their time on snow.

The practical consequences of this regulatory gap were tragically illustrated in the deaths of Matilde Lorenzi and Matteo Franzoso. In both cases, the athletes were on non-competition training runs: Matilde Lorenzi was taking part in a giant-slalom training session in Val Senales (Italy), while Matteo Franzoso was in pre-season training in La Parva (Chile). Matilde Lorenzi’s fall occurred in a section of the slope considered low risk, where no protective barriers had been installed and nothing mitigated her fall. In FIS-calendar contexts, the ICR requires protective installations to be in place for Jury inspection and provides for Jury inspection before official training begins. Read with the general protective principle in Art 702.3, this creates a structured mechanism by which the Jury can require additional protections where a fall could expose a competitor to risks. In the absence of that process, the area into which she fell had simply not been treated as a zone requiring protection.

According to the Italian Winter Sports Federation (FISI), Matteo Franzoso crashed through two rows of netting and hit a fence off the course which had no padding. Outside FIS-calendar competitions and official training on the homologated race piste, there is no single set of FIS rules that universally governs how safety nets must be installed for training or lower-level events. Instead, safety is shaped by a patchwork of national federation regulations, local law and manufacturers’ guidelines, which typically expect training to be run under race-equivalent protection, yet do not always ensure it in practice, particularly where resources, oversight or venue constraints intervene.

Had these runs taken place at FIS calendar competitions, homologation requirements would have mandated multiple layers of nets, sufficient run-off areas, padding on impact zones, and pre-training inspections. However, as their training fell outside the strongest regulatory perimeter, those protections were not consistently guaranteed.

Motorsport: A System Designed to Travel Down the Pyramid

Motorsport presents a useful comparison because, while the FIA operates within a sport that benefits from substantially greater resources at the elite end, its safety framework is designed not only for the pinnacle of competition, but to operate through a wider ecosystem of championships and events. Two features are particularly relevant: (1) structured and centralised incident reporting; and (2) objective data collection tools that support learning from accidents.

Centralised reporting and defined incident categories

Importantly, the FIA expressly promotes the system to ASNs (national sporting authorities) and urges them to become familiar with the World Accident Database (WADB) procedures, reflecting an intention that structured reporting should extend beyond the elite tier and operate across domestic activity within an ASN’s territory.

A key feature of the WADB model is that it categorises incidents (for example, “Fatal Accident” and “Serious Accident”) and uses defined “trigger” definitions to determine what must be reported. The FIA further explains that ASNs are requested to submit data for accidents occurring in four-wheeled motor sport events on the ASN’s territory, with specified exclusions (including FIA Championships and certain series equipped with Accident Data Recorders, onboard electronic devices fitted to competition cars that measure and record accident data, which are reported through FIA-appointed delegates in collaboration with the ASN).

The regulatory logic is important: safety improvement is treated as a systemic exercise. Incidents are logged to generate a data set capable of revealing recurring hazards, structural weaknesses, and the types of environments where serious harm is most likely.

Accident Data Recorders and “black box” learning

In addition, the FIA operates an Accident Data Recorder (ADR) programme, a form of “black box” technology that captures objective data on the forces and circumstances of an incident. The utility is obvious: when safety debates are supported by measured impact and data, regulators can refine circuit requirements, barrier technology and operational protocols on the basis of evidence rather than inference.

Crucially, this data-driven architecture is not confined to the absolute top tier. In the FIA Formula Regional framework (a lower category), the 2025 FIA Formula Regional Technical Regulations expressly require that “all cars must be equipped with an accident data recorder approved according to FIA Standard 8872-2018 [ …] and […] installed according to the ‘Installation specification’” (Article 8.5). This illustrates that mandatory crash-data capture is built into the regulatory philosophy even where budgets are materially lower than at the elite end.

The same direction of travel is evident even earlier in the pathway. In karting, the FIA has introduced a low-cost Impact Data Recorder (IDR) and reported its successful debut in the FIA Karting Academy Trophy, i.e. a development series aimed at young drivers.

Although motorsport operates within a more commercially exploited ecosystem than skiing, and the FIA therefore has access to comparatively greater resources, its framework remains instructive for FIS. The key point is not to replicate the scale of investment seen in motorsport, but to adopt the design of its governance tools and calibrate them to winter sports’ realities. In particular, structured reporting standards and centralised analysis are capable of being implemented at relatively modest cost, and can be scaled incrementally across disciplines and levels.

Why Lower Tiers Are More Exposed

The difference between top-tier and lower-tier safety is driven by resources, visibility and enforcement. Elite events are shaped by broadcasting, insurance and international scrutiny. Lower-level activity is often delivered on thin budgets, limited staffing and imperfect venues.

In skiing, the issue is compounded by the fact that much training takes place on slopes operated by private resort entities. Resorts may grant piste access for training, but the infrastructure is not necessarily configured to “race-equivalent” standards, particularly where the activity sits outside the FIS-calendar pathway that triggers homologation-linked installations and formal inspection under the ICR. By contrast, motorsport is more consistently routed through a permissioning structure. Circuits and events are typically required to obtain approval to host competition under the relevant authority’s rules, and that approval process tends to operate alongside (and be reinforced by) insurance requirements. The practical effect is that venue compliance and risk management are treated as preconditions to staging competition, which helps to drive more consistent safety baselines across the calendar.

Towards a Safer Structure: Regulatory and Practical Reform

A key component of improving safety standards is the ability to learn systematically from accidents and near-misses. FIS implements the Techical Delegate Accident Reporting whereby, in the event of a “serious accident at a competition, the Techincal delegate must complete the accident report and submit it along with the Techincal Delegate Report. However, outside the competition environments, incidents are not always recorded in a centralised or standardised way. At lower levels of competition and in everyday training, reporting is inconsistent across jurisdictions, leaving federations without the data needed to identify recurring hazards, assess risks objectively and intervene early.

A similar reporting framework to the FIA’s in skiing would be transformative. If every serious high-speed fall into an unprotected area, every net hit, and every medical evacuation from a training environment had to be reported and logged, federations would quickly build an evidence base showing where risks are most acute. That evidence could support targeted rule changes.

In parallel, the permission concept is important. In motorsport, the ability to stage events is typically tied to authorisation and compliance with safety requirements. In skiing, where training often depends on access to privately operated slopes, a comparable mechanism could involve federations and resorts adopting a structured authorisation approach for defined categories of high-risk training, so that access to training lanes is contingent on minimum safety infrastructure and inspection sign-off.

In short, what is measured can be managed. Without structured reporting and data- driven analysis, safety remains reactive. With it, federations can act proactively: tightening rules where necessary, supporting organisers and resorts to implement safer designs, and ensuring that protections do not depend on whether the activity happens to be televised or attached to a flagship event.