FIS collaboration develops snow sports-specific injury and illness data registration

The FIS Athlete Health Unit (AHU) has collaborated with Jörg Spörri, Head of Sports Medical Research at Balgrist University Hospital, to develop a snow sports-specific harmonization of injury and illness registration methods. 

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) published a consensus statement in 2020 that provided recommendations on the definition, collection, and reporting of injury and illness data for athletes across different sports. 

The aim of producing a snow sports extension was to provide guidelines for collecting and reporting data for disciplines under the FIS umbrella for use by international and national sporting federations and governing bodies and researchers. 

It relates to athletes from elite to youth and recreational levels across each of the FIS disciplines and is also partially applicable to other snow sports such as biathlon, ski mountaineering and para snow sports. 

The overall objective is to better protect athletes’ physical and mental health through injury and illness prevention. 

 “Injury registration is one checkpoint that you have to see whether your prevention measures work or not. It’s important to know exactly where the problems are, which type of injuries the hotspots are. So, the epidemiology is quite important to then have more tailored prevention measures,” says Spörri. 

“The overall goal of this is injury prevention so bringing things into action but it’s like a navigation tool that you have on where to go and whether you finally reach your aim.” 

The project got underway in July 2022 with the formation of a 27-strong consensus panel, comprising 12 women and 15 men. 

They were selected on the basis of representing a wide range of expertise, background, and diversity in order to have as many different perspectives as possible. 

Included were former elite athletes, physiotherapists who also had experience of health issues, team medical officers, researchers, the IOC, and epidemiologists.  

They were divided into sub-groups to focus on specific areas including women’s health, youth athletes, and the different snow sports disciplines where illnesses and injuries are sport-specific. 

Recommendations were made regarding the definition and classification of health problems and their severity, the classification of sports injuries and illness diagnoses, capturing and reporting exposure – where an athlete is at risk of injury – and measures of occurrence. 

Data collection methods have evolved since injury registration was completed based on a single retrospective interview at the end of the season. 

The recommendation is that data be collected over the season to encompass training injuries and overuse issues as well as the severe in-competition injuries. 

Spörri recognises that fewer resources in the smaller federation can be an issue as can the compliance of athletes in completing their questionnaires. 

But a move to the standardisation of collection and reporting rather than it being done by individual National Ski Associations (NSA) can only be favourable in terms of injury and illness prevention. 

“We can combine national statistics and fuse them in terms of outcomes,” he says.