Helmets used to be pretty rare around any ski area. In fact, it was just two decades ago when fewer than one in four people wore a helmet while skiing or snowboarding. The National Ski Areas Association says that number has skyrocketed since the turn of the century (when all those people were not wearing helmets), and now at least 90 percent of people wear one.
What changed? We take head trauma more seriously than we used to as a society. A big part of that, of course, is simply having a better grasp on the real effects of even a single concussion. For perspective, some 41,545 scientific articles were published covering head trauma across more than 3,000 journals around the world between 2003 and 2024. A study from the National Library of Medicine said that studies of the subject had increased by 10-fold.
So yeah, we take traumatic brain injuries seriously nowadays.
Back to the original point, where science and skiing have an entertaining intersection with a skier named Juho Kilkki. Juho is one of the most creative and curious minds in skiing, and is the brains behind Real Skifi. For years, he’s done stuff like use freestyle skiing stunts and tricks to test out Newton’s Laws of Motion, for example.
He just suffered his first ever skiing concussion while filming recently. It seemed like a nondescript spill, but Juho couldn’t remember what happened just moments later and he never even lost consciousness. That realization was a scary one for him.
If you’ve never suffered a concussion or you’ve never seen somebody suffer one, this three-minute video is worth a watch. Even minor concussions can be scary.
