The Sally Francklyn Story from HighFivesFoundation on Vimeo.
NFL football players wear helmets, and they still suffer debilitating and sometimes fatal head trauma. And so do skiers and snowboarders. And not just professional skiers or snowboarders catching 25 feet of air above the lip of an 18-foot superpipe, or freeskiers doing backflips off cliff bands. Skiing and snowboarding can be dangerous even for the casual enthusiast. The Sally Francklyn Story is a poignant video that documents how a good skier can have a bad accident.
The topic of head injuries has been in the media forefront lately, in The Crash Reel documentary featured at this year’s Mountainfilm festival in Telluride, and in articles by Marc Peruzzi in Outside Magazine print and online editions . How have extreme sports and the drive to go bigger, higher, faster fueled a rise in the incidence of traumatic brain injuries? What can we do to keep athletes safe?
There is no simple answer to these questions, but there is one simple thing you can do when you head out onto the slopes this year: Buy a helmet. Wear your helmet. And encourage others to do the same thing.
Check out the #loveyourbrain campaign page where you can win prizes and make an online pledge to wear a helmet.
Here’s the trailer from The Crash Reel: