Oh, this looks kind of interesting in bobsleigh, luge and skeleton collectively known as the sliding sports crashes are an inevitability tearing down the hill. Oh, my goodness, it's traumatic, it's aggressive! It's anything that is extreme dude yeah. Nobody dies in here right. Nobody gets injured like they.

Don't show it right, surely time stan to think that somebody has gone to the olympics without having had an episode like a crash is very unlikely. Wowzers, christina smith, is a trailblazer in the sport of bobsled, one of the most experienced drivers in the field. But in the years since she's retired, she started to experience troubling symptoms, long-term, short-term memory, loss, anxiety, fear, depression, the inability to really stay focused and have emotional regulation. Eventually she was diagnosed with a traumatic brain.

Something of myself that i didn't realize potentially could have been contributed to the effects of the multiple runs. Multiple vibrations, the concussions that actually had never been diagnosed with my entire career. There's growing evidence that when it comes to the sliding sports, catastrophic concussions, like the ones you get from crashing, might not be the main driver of brain injury. Micro concussions are high concussions, so mild.

They can often go unnoticed and so common that they have a special name. Sled head, oh, when you to understand how sled head happens, you have to know how concussions work your brain is soft, with a jello like consistency. Normally, it's pretty well protected by layers of bone and tissue, but if your head gets hit or shook around or just moves too fast, your brain can shift inside its protective casing, bumping up against the sides of your skull. When that happens, the fragile neurons that make up your brain can stretch or even tear and when they tear they release toxins that can harm other neurons, triggering a chain reaction of damage and leaving your brain vulnerable to further injury.

Concussions are serious and come with scary side effects, but for the most part they heal 27 months. The problem is not all concussions are obvious: hey if you got out of that sled and you're just a little bit dizzy and then all of a sudden, it's like no i'm good and you're full of adrenaline, and essentially, if you have the will and the desire To get back up and dust yourself off and do it again so be it, but even a mild concussion is a concussion and if it's not given the time to heal the damage can become more serious and cause more enduring symptoms. That kind of scattered, brain and uh, you know inability to focus so a lot of those little things. It's all those little things that make up sled head from the outside sledding sports, look smooth a graceful if fast run down an icy track, but that's like that's like quick things, look and feel very different.

Sledding is in a way, inherently brain rattling, even during the smoothest ride. A sledder is tossed about shaken bumped, whipped around corners. It's so extreme that if you haven't gone to bathroom, if you haven't blown your nose and if you haven't stretched, you have no idea. What's going to happen to you, there's lots of bouncing and people moving quickly.

The heads are going everywhere. Peter mccarthy is a neurophysiologist whose research focuses neurophysiologists forces affect our bodies. He told me that sledding is a lot like a very, very intense roller coaster. They're rickety and they've got lots of vibrations and they've got high g turns g as in g-force, roughly the force of gravity or acceleration.

I don't enter the shallow end of a pool summers ago and now this video is scaring the out riding an average roller coaster. Around five military fighter, pilots average nine g's and the average average 103 g's when hit during a game the g-force of an average concussion. I'm actually surprised that you're only getting 103 gs, which is only 10 times what you're, normally just getting by just sitting down at all times, reach nine g's only ten times. It's not guys guys it's ten times we're not talking about, like hundreds ten times is not insane.

Football player receives 103 g's when hit during a game. The g guys 9g compared to 100 g, isn't that 10 times force of an average concussion. But it's hard to measure or generalize, but one researcher found that most diagnosed ones have a g-force between 85 and 95 and when another researcher measured the g-force of his own skeleton ride at the whistler olympic track at its highest. Here he recorded 84.5 g-force.

That spike only happened for a few milliseconds, but spikes like it can happen with every run, and then there are the vibrations long-term exposure to vibrations can lead to a range of serious health issues affecting basically all of your body's systems. There are even international guidelines about how much vibration someone should encounter in a given period and when peter attached devices on the helmets, sleds and backs of skeleton athletes to measure how much they were encountering preliminary results showed that doing just one run could potentially put you Over the limit, a sled head is a phenomenon which seems to be neurological in nature and, as a consequence, you're thinking that maybe the vibrations are getting through into the brain, and that could be the cause. All racing sports deal with both g-force and vibration. To a certain extent, but normally they get dispersed throughout your body when you're in the sled there's not much between your brain yeah you're in a hard shell and you're not.

I was so close enough. Nothing to absorb that. I had chips of paint and scratches on the side of my helmet from just tapping going all the way down the track, and so you know, of course i get out and i haven't had a crash or nothing would happen, but that just built up over time, Like a snowball years after she stopped sledding, christina went to a specialist who ran a test, call or q-e-e-g guys. Beauty of this is that it can.

Actually, how do you even come about being a sledder? Yes, it can be like a a 10 year old. Wake up in the morning and say: hey mom, go go drop me off smile at the sled big ass thing. Did it let's go probably or partially or too much when doctors analyzed her results. They saw this roughly.

The red shading correlates to over activation in a brain that hadn't experienced trauma. Those areas would be white. It was like uh. Well, you think it's mine moment for me.

It really highlighted you know what i had been uh going through, and i was no longer hard on myself funny. It was very common to overlook our own experiences because we're always about the show must go on there's only so much. We can learn from one person's brain scans or the data from a few runs. It needs an objective.

I've had brainstorms my brain's very good discipline, pretty wicked, because if we just allow people to keep doing this, we don't know excuses system could detect an impact and have that person immediately flagged for treatment and possibly sitting out. They could calculate the electricity in a multiple waves alpha beta gamma waves, some and they get all the electric signals, and there are some exciting developments in tech like virtual reality, trainings that can reduce ice time or an fda approved um removed collar that increases blood volume. In your brain, giving it better cushioning in the future, new materials could dampen vibrations in the sled, but the federation that controls sliding sports needs to make these available or even mandatory, and i feel that that's sort of hopefully a way forward. But who knows it depends on international bodies to make these legislative changes and start looking at their athletes.

As actually, when do you when you compete, you you give your life to competing the lifeblood of any sport. Here's what it is. I need to protect them. In my mind, people that guys people that people that throw the the ball at in in bet in baseball they they throw the ball at speeds that that the arm shouldn't do man it.

It breaks their shoulder it snaps into our arm. It is what it is. If you, if you have pip pictures, dude they're, really throwing their limb as fast, they can out of their body. Of course it rips everything man if it isn't and there's not much you're gon na you're gon na regulate people are still gon na, throw the ball man.

You know we want to compete, it might be at the top. It is what it is yeah you can make inventions do this or that, but there's a risk to everything. Man and when you compete at the highest levels. There's there's there's increasing, especially when you do like stuff like uh football and whatnot.

There will be real and i think people are okay with that and people. Okay with that people live a a good life and yeah when they're 60 70 yeah they're, they they get kind of slow or kind of buzzy, but that their life, they probably enjoyed living man - and i think people can be okay with that man. I'd be okay with that. If i, if i competed and i was gon na, i was gon na get softy at 65, but hey this is what it is.

Then i had a good run there. I'm okay, i'm okay! I had a good runner. Well, i want to say you should die as fast as possible by damaging your body, but you know like you can't and nobody's going to live up until 110 and and you get it oh guys, i'm i'm getting headaches. That's 97 years old man i shouldn't he should have done that i mean not really, that's not that doesn't make sense play some talk of punch.

You.