The Risk of Riding Mountain Bikes

The drawback of more capable modern bikes is that when something goes wrong it happens at higher speed. As speed goes up, the severity of injuries goes up too.

For what it's worth, my worst injuries in the last couple of years have been at slow speeds, but narrowly avoided kissing a tree at high speed too. 

I haven’t been able to dig into the article, yet. I’d be curious if it includes a meta analysis that might detect trends in the factors around the incidents. Types of trails, experience level of riders, type of protection in use or not present, etc.. 

If we are going to try to mitigate risks, it would be helpful to understand factors that might increase or decrease it. 

It does seem like there’s been an uptick in serious injuries/even death the last few years. It certainly has me thinking harder about the risks I choose. I’m finding myself being more cautious about riding solo, and contemplating better protection (riding in a full face more, looking at buying chest protection for when riding more difficult terrain).

I think the question posed in the article -“is mountain biking inherently more dangerous” is a pretty clear -yes. Speed/steep terrain/hard surfaces. Pretty obvious what’s going to do more damage, two feet of powder or a tree stump. I am curious how rise of flow trails would impact the stats. Opening up sections of trail for more flow/speed might result in less crashes, but increased odds of serious injury? 

Lots to think about. My main takeaway over the last few years has been to ride solo less. I also am starting to ride with a satellite messaging device (zoleo). 

I remember a smilar case too:

Applying the injuries BC sees to the general populace is ill-advised lol. Mountain biking has always been dangerous but I like Bryan's point. Basically the 'average' rider can trick themselves into thinking, more or less, they are NOT the average rider on their above average bike and when that check comes in and the skill deficit hits. Your ass gets cashed.

Rode BMX bikes my entire life. No serious injuries somehow, despite not wearing a helmet (good ol days eh). I finally broke my elbow riding BMX as an adult and it's what lead me into mountain biking due to the limitations it created on BMX bikes.

Mountain biking? In the 5 years I've been doing it I did my collarbone in, only like a year in basically lol. And earlier this year got my first concussion and slightly broke my back. Why? Speed man. Long jumps and lots of speed. And it's hard to completely eliminate that risk. You'll be riding good all day. Riding good all year. Whatever. Get too comfortable at speed and you just turned that 25 footer into a 30 footer without realizing it.

But here's the ironic bit. That's all healed. It barely stopped me riding. Soon as the back felt loose again just went right back to riding. However I BARELY clipped my foot on a rock a year ago (almost to the date)... And it's been the most nagging injury I've maybe had in my life. Never got it scanned because it didn't hurt that much and 'healed' almost instantly. But it comes back every day in the bike park (or rough stuff).

All that said, the average rider just going blue and single black trails on an average trail bike at average speeds is generally safe. Might even say averagely safe.

A youtuber did a big video about modern bikes tricking people into riding above their heads. But it's not a sexy topic because brands and enthusiasts hate it. "Just ride better" basically. And it sells bikes. Ironically the bikes that enthusiasts want for gnarly shit and beginners want to do the work for them are often the same bike design. Go figurrre lol 

i think part of it is also people getting in over their heads, overestimating their abilities.  at my local bike park I routinely see this occur. there was one incident this fall I was riding the lift, witnessed a guy go over the bars, lawn dart himself and not move. it wasn't a particularly difficult trail either. i told the lift attendants as soon as I unloaded, but thankfully the guy was riding with some other people. i caught up with one of the patrol guys later in the day, sounds like the guy thankfully only had a concussion.  but still. 

I've only been riding for 9 years, and it seems like the speeds are MUCH higher in that time alone for everyone. 

There are really multiple types of MTB riding.  I'll mention two of them and we will call them "classic" and "modern" to differentiate them.  Classic type is where you go out and ride natural trails in the wilderness.  Modern is more bmx and moto inspired and has lots of jumps on groomed trails with higher overall speeds.  

The rise of bike parks has made modern riding much more accessible.  I would say that jumping is the riskiest thing you can do on a mountain bike.  More people jumping = more serious injuries.

I haven't ridden BC outside of a day trip to Whistler over ten years ago when I was a complete beginner. But looking at the videos from Remy and other YouTubers there seems to be endless "pro" level trails that I would probably stay away from despite considering myself a very good rider.

That said, I'm blown away with some of the stuff I see on YouTube in the USA and particularly the UK, "easy" bike park flow trails now all of a sudden have massive jumps and drops. I feel like this is setting up a trap when beginners feel like they can ride these smooth and not too steep trails avoiding the jumps, then build up the confidence to hit some of the jumps without realizing the risk involved in hitting big jumps at speed.

Personally I can't watch pinkbikes Friday fail series, it's just people way out of their depth hitting stuff they have no right being close to. I'm pretty sure a lot of the riders suffer concussions.

Having ridden and raced for over 15 years, DH then Enduro, I always accepted there was a risk involved, and was fairly unfazed by my radius fracture, broken finger, collarbone and losing a lot of skin over the years. I actually think bikes are way safer now, I haven't worn knee pads for 90% of rides in 5 years, has not bitten me yet. Unfortunately, I'm now 6 months from my last big crash that left me with a small concussion, and I'm still feeling effects on a daily basis. That one is really messing with me as I can tell I really can't afford another one of those in my lifetime, and unfortunately even though I am a very calculated rider, freak accidents do happen.

so I read through the actual published study (link here for anyone interested: https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/neur.2024.0103 ).  As someone who works in a medicine adjacent field that is also a experienced cyclist, I found one surprising omission in the study - that there was no data on the experience level of those who experienced spinal injuries (especially given the inclusion of other population data - gender, age, marital status, employment). I get it from a medical perspective (an injury is an injury), but from a cycling perspective I think it would be beneficial to understand whether or not the injuries are occurring at a rate that can be correlated to experience level. 

Just some interesting surface level things to note from the paper being referenced: that study looks at the years 2008-2024, but a very similar study was done by the same author that looked at injuries between 1995 and 2007. There were more injuries in the second time period than the first (43 vs 56), with more motor complete injuries (e.g. paraplegic ) in the second period as well.

While we might like to think we aren't in these demographics, the majority of individuals sustaining injuries are 31-40 year old married men, and about equal between 21-30 and 41-50 men under that.

They do mention that they only treated three hockey players in the same time frame, but there is not any data about the number of hockey players vs mtbers in the area. The majority of injuries happened in and around Whistler and mostly OTB accidents. It doesn't specify enough to know if these were enthusiasts or just someone riding - there is a chance some of these injuries were someone riding off-road in their commuter and hitting a pothole.

There is also a comparison made with junior/college football, where the entire US population had fewer spinal cord injuries than just this one BC hospital. That would probably the hospital with the highest incidents of MTB injuries in Canada but the population of the country is 10% of the US.

My own input:

The fact that it's going up at all is concerning. It would be good to be able to dig down into the mechanisms of injury and the situation at the time to find out how exactly this all happened - while we know there are OTBs, were they from going beyond their skill level, during jump vs tech trails, maybe even big vs small bikes? While there probably are more people riding real MTB now, it seems like more capable bikes and better gear has not really increased 'safety'. Is it that more capable equipment has led us to increasing the size/speed/scale of features and therefore risk? The odd thing is that the number of females going in for the same injuries did not change between the two periods. Surely if the MTB population has grown, the number of women in the sport has as well - why is the increase in injuries not reflected there? I can't imagine it's just peer pressure and testosterone when so many injuries are occurring in 30+ or even 40+ married men.

Avoiding big jumps has worked for me in the last years.

I'm reaching 50 in 2 months,have broken a elbow dirtjumping at 28 and a tibia 5 years ago on a XC ride when a friend touched my front wheel on a high speed fireroad. Also a mild concussion landing a small drop head first from a muddy glove sliping the grip somewhere in the mid 00s.

I guess for 35 years of mountain biking,including 20 years racing DH, it's not that bad a result.

Having nothing to prove and trying to ride fast without going out of control works for me.

I've been riding mountain bikes since 1992 (over 30 years! 😬).

In 2021 I managed to crush two vertebra going OTB at MSA. I'm back to riding now because I got lucky and didn't damage my spinal cord. I have three observations:

1. there are way more "flow trails" and purpose built trails now than ever before. these scare me the most, as the speeds you can reach are dangerously high, and the skills required to ride them "safely" take a long time to to develop. like I said, I got lucky with my injury, and my 30 years experience didn't help me. I was on a flow section of trail, hitting a section with three relatively small tabletops in a row. all it took was one moment of inattention, and in the blink of an eye (that felt like an eternity), I went otb, folded in half when I hit the ground and broke two vertebrae, my coracoid process, and 3 ribs in multiple locations.

2. bikes are way more capable then they ever were, and it is really easy to get into situations where the bike has more capability than the rider.

3. since the pandemic there are waaaaaay more new riders than there has ever been. coupled with points 1 and 2, this is a recipe for disaster imo. 

Not sure what my point is, but I agree with the person above that would like to get data on type of trail and rider experience. I feel like land owners and public authorities are building mostly blue "flow" trails believing they are safer, while my gut feeling is that they are not. (as an aside, I think these types of trails also have a higher potential for conflicts with other users because of the higher speeds). 

I've only been on mtb for a couple years. Before that I had years (15 maybe?) of street/park bmx plus some commuter/road bikes.

MTB is FAST. Scary fast. And I can almost accidentally get going stupid caveman fast on relatively smooth singletrack. I've had a few times where my brain interjects and goes "hey, man, if you stack it up right now you're going to be bedridden for a while." And that's with all of my experience and comfort on two wheels. What about someone else who's newer? What about someone who panics and their first instinct it to take their feet off and deathgrip rather than shift their weight and hit brakes or make a calm maneuver to avoid danger.

I wonder if some of the wide-and-flowy greens and blues all you cats out there have need a little city traffic design thought brought into 'em where you design periodic pinch points, reroutes, visuals, and a million other things to control how things flow and the speeds people are comfortable with/able to reach. There probably are trail systems with that sort of stuff in them already. I'm in the middle of the US plains; it's all mostly flat out here with no trail centers to speak of so I wouldn't necessarily know what's happening out in the rest of the mtb trail world.

I've been an advocate for steep jumps instead of long and lows for a while due to beginner behavior and injury chances. 
 

Build a flow trail with decent size jumps towards the end at moderate speed and they will feel confident enough to do them, as the lips are shallow and you just ride off them at trail speed, but the speeds are high enough a crash causes serious injuries.

Build a jump trail with steep lips, speed is "lost" due to traveling up more (I know its not exactly like this) and crash speeds will be lower, but most importantly, beginners are scared of steep take-offs as they know you can't just ride off them, you need to actively jump, which is a skill they don't have. The fear is the injury prevention here.

I hate to say it but this is not surprising.   This sport, especially for a subset of skilled and motivated riders is getting real f’in GNAR-LY.   Modern trails are a reflection of how much the sport has progressed, but there is a real dark side to it.   

It’s up to the individual to recognize where they lie on the “I am wagering my skills against life and limb” spectrum.   It’s not easy.   I have been mountain biking for 35 yrs and never had more than some scrapes and some strains, but I’m really cautious.    It’s taken a LOT of vigilance and building skills slowly, and I’m probably kinda lucky too.   I avoid big jumps as well.  One really has to ask themselves “ if I go down, what would happen here?”    A single glance off a root or a loose rock can change a life permanently.   

I think we will see this trend continue unless riders tone it down.   There is a lot of egos out there with a lot to prove, no judgement.   

I think the risks of a sever injury crashing are under estimated because most of the time you are fine. Little scrape here or something and move on. I have also seen people increasingly push their own boundaries into things they are not capable of doing with reasonable expectation of success. Basically if they don't crash it's luck not skill.

I don't think warning's like you get on a pack of cig's is the answer. Shocking I think people need to take responsibility for their own level of risk tolerance. If you can't tell that the possibility of hitting a tree at 20 or falling off a 30 ft cliff could cause serious bodily harm you should most likely spend more time inside. 

Things can be done better especially at pay to play bike parks. Often times beginner trails are either shit, or not really beginner at all. A wide open fire road can be way more dangerous then even and lower gradient trail in the woods. Signage can 100% be better about explaining what people are getting into. You often see people are resorts that have limited time riding a bike on trails in a rental full face, a dh bike, and some unsuitable clothing. 

The risks for beginner skiers I would say is less, but the education system around the activity is also set up a lot better.

Mountain biking has grown in popularity,  dirt and rocks are hard, young men don’t have great risk assessment abilities combined with that with the crazy dopamine hit you get when things go right will mean there will be more worse consequences sometimes.  

Riding bikes down hills is the sickest. 

Obviously by experience is anecdotal at best with a very small sample size.  But its blatantly clear wether it’s one of the most dedicated and skilled bikers I know, a middle aged family weekend warrior, or a young guy on one of his first rides the risk is there.  

none of these were examples of poorly designed trail, bad signage, or something like the unfortunate incident that led to the closure of the bike park near mt hood a couple years ago.  Simply user error by mountain bikers pushing themselves and making mistakes on trails in their skill level.  

At the end of the day i would love to see more standardization of signage practices.  And more importantly if you are going to use signs you need to be really consistent.  Like if you are going to sign all the mandatory drops and gaps on one double black trail you need to sign them on all of them.  Or even just post a sign saying “unmarked mandatory features” at the trail entrance. As while it’s always user error for making a mistake riding blind.  If you make it safe to do on one trail you may assume it’s safe to on a similarly rated trail.
 

Also a big fan of spray paint on sharp rocks or wheel grabbers.  At speed a little help differentiating something you really don’t want to run over can be really nice.  And I get why a bike park would maybe not want to essentially highlight what is dangerous atleast here in America with liability.  But I still think it’s a helpful practice a lot of bike parks don’t really use except maybe for a race track.

I blame the advent of Striders and the like. 2-year-olds got comfortable ripping around, then became adolescents who ripped harder, then young adults who slay things. In that time we all had to catch up as they passed us by as we got older. 

All kidding aside, it's a bouillabaisse of reasons. Bikes got better at handling higher speeds and bigger hits, trails got purpose built to accommodate that, the MeDiA hype the amazing skills of riders, and so began a whole 'nother version of the me too movement. Sea to Sky may not be the best example overall due to the size of the population riding bikes in the woods but certainly bringing skatepark builds to trails plays an honest part. A local spot here that works super close with a county park agency had to do a lot of development of access points for 1st responders. That place is jammed on the weekends with riders of all backgrounds. I haven't heard of any flights for life out of there, but apparently the local paramedics are staying pretty busy. Out in Madison the local org has been on a tear getting proper jumps built in a lot of locations, more than half I've no interest in at this point in my life, what with a spouse, house and a couple pups to attend to. And let us not forget being scrared, even a wee bit so, adds a helluvalot of joy to riding. 

As areas build out, as skills advance generation after generation, limits will keep expanding. What was once HUGE will be tomorrow's blue. The Jah drop got landed, the 25 set in Lyons too. Better safety gear definitely fits into a parallel growth category, stuff that's comfortable to ride in on climbs as well as downs in summer, much less summer in some place like Florida. 

The injuries will keep happening and will probably have a correlation with the growth of the sport, and as features on trails get bigger more severe injuries will occur. Ultimately everyone has to do their own risk calcs, and that probably explains the growth of adventure cycling. Putting tires to dirt is always a good idea in near anyway one goes about it.

Yes.   It’s so cool.   

I think it is really important to understand that it’s not people making mistakes. It’s the equipment. 
Has to be the old 3 wheelers argument. 

This injury data is a direct result of steeper headtube angles and fork offset, and it’s time we relinquish control of headtube angles that are essentially murdering the riders.

Kill all bikes. Especially the ones with 66 degree head tubes. And road bikes. 

I’m joking. But also, the majority of the papers tracked incidents were “over the bars”…….

Yes. I ride a spire. 
And barely escaped the icu after 10 days because of my bad ass helmet. I’m afraid of dying on my bike, and will absolutely be riding park again. With a better chest protector. 

It's anecdotal, but the trails I ride almost exclusively definitely fall into that 'natural' category, as they are rocky, loose, and often steep for short bits, both up and down.

I don't Strava every ride but when I started the sport, I'd often average about 4.5-5mph (I know, I'm slow!), that's up and down. It was tough terrain, my fitness wasn't that great, I'm not a natural talent or athlete, and the bikes were notably slower. The thing is, that I was still going 'the pace' that most riders were going.

Now, 8-9 years later, I commonly average 8-9mph on the same or even rougher trails on my bike (ignoring my e-bike at the moment). It's important to note that to average 8.5 mph you end up going 15+ on the downhill sections, a lot of the time.

I can average considerably higher speeds on more flowy trails (think Bentonville).

This might not sound like much speed difference, but it's nearly double actually. A majority for me was made up on the climbs, but I'm also certainly faster on the descents. From where I sit, good or bad, the new bikes are just so much faster now once the terrain gets rough.

As far as the e-bike, it's no faster on the descents, just the climbs, so I don't feel it adds any additional danger.

So, from where I sit, the capability of modern bikes has led to much higher speeds and more confidence overall, and that's going to result in more severe accidents.

Purely anecdotal, but as someone connected in both the climbing and mountain biking communities, in the past decade I personally know 4 people that have sustained spinal injuries while climbing (specifically, all from bouldering falls) but 0 people from mountain biking, despite being and hanging out with a bunch of bike part rats. 

Thing is, these are inherently risky hobbies. There are choices we can personally make to manage and limit those risks. But isn't the lack of guardrails what makes these things exciting, fulfilling? So much in our lives is safe, sterile, boring. Unless we seek out the things that make us feel alive, might as well be dead.

Regarding experience level of those injured, I would hazard a guess that a substantial majority of the serious injuries were to experienced riders. 

As much as we all like to think that we are "good enough" to avoid mistakes that lead to injury, statistics from other areas indicate differently. The better a rider you are the more likely you are going faster or riding less forgiving terrain/ features. When something goes wrong it happens faster and harder, that makes the injuries more severe. Clipping a tree at 5mph is very different than clipping one at 15mph. 

With more skill and experience, the frequency of injury should go down but the severity likely goes up.

Professional race car drivers have similar accidents rates in normal driving to average drivers. 

There are no comparisons* in the academic article for a perfectly sound reason: the sample is too small and too special.

The comparison made by the newspaper article, the very recent past vs a span of years preceding it, only gives a tentative sign that the rate of spinal injury is higher than it used to be.

Y’all raise good questions but these data don’t shed much light on them.

*e.g. skill category, years of experience

Interestingly one of the questions in the questionnaire I was given at the Thredbo medical centre when I wrote myself off there was "how many times have you ridden the trail you crashed on?"

I actually think the opposite, your more stable at high speeds and less likely that your front wheel will hang up and send you OTB. A more advanced rider is also less likely to freeze up and try to correct the situation. I lived in Whistler for quite a while and the more serious injuries I heard of were mostly intermediate riders (partners of an advanced rider were common) riding trails outside the bike park.

My earlier comment strikes me as too circular and I want another shot at saying things more clearly. Here's why I think you can't make inferences from the demographics of the study population even when they did collect the data (e.g. sex), not just when they didn't collect it (e.g. skill level).

Every inference that can be supported by the data set has to begin with "If a rider sustained a spinal cord injury within the study time and place, then ..." This is because every rider who didn't sustain a spinal injury was excluded.

I suppose you can say that if a rider sustained a spinal cord injury within the study time and place, then the rider had a 93.1% chance of being male.

But I don't think you say male riders were 13.5 times more likely (m. 93.1% / f. 6.9%) to sustain a spinal cord injury, because the study offers no information about riders who didn't sustain a spinal cord injury. How many were there? These data can't tell us anything about male riders, generally, or female riders, generally, or riders with comorbidities, generally, or riders who are single/married/divorced, generally

Had the study included a skill level category for each participant, we'd be stuck in the same place as we are with sex. We might see more spinal cord injuries in beginners or inters or experts, but not be able to say anything about risk in the sense of the likelihood of any rider sustaining a spinal injury. I think that frustration came across in the article. The counts of people riding and not crashing, or riding and crashing but not sustaining a spinal injury, aren't easy data to get a hold of. An organization like a big bike resort is one of the few potential sources. But the bike resort clearly wanted nothing to do with that story.