Is the Hahnenhahm too dangerous?

Another thrilling race in Kitzbuel this weekend. However, it came with a heavy toll for several racers including tour leader Aksel Lund Svindal :cry: . Svindal along with 3 other racers suffered season-ending ACL injuries in the race and race practice. Hannes Reickert was also injured but thankfully his injuries are less serious and he is expected to be back competing within a few weeks.

Considering they only allowed the top 30 racers to start (due to high winds), this seems like an extremely high toll of serious injuries. Is it too much? Do they need to modify course to make it safer like they have done to some circuits on the F1 racing circuit? I know this would reduce some of the excitement that goes with the event but is this reasonable?

How many years have they races on this piste and how manybad injuries has there been?

Not much you can do when light is that flat, race should never have started. Still that would not of looked good for Austrian skiing which again seems to be having a very dry winter, which had not made for very pleasant course conditions.

Quite frankly it looked like the course looked like it needed a visit from a piste basher.
It's a tight, fast downhill course with seemingly far more bumps than in recent years that the racers were struggling with.

The light was flat but that in itself is unremarkable it wasn't foggy or heavy snow and I doubt the wind was to blame.
It just seemed to be so bumpy that it was unsafe at racing speeds and there's no run off to compound the issue.

Was it any less safe when Svindal came down than for those before? Not really they just carried in to get the requisite numbers for the race to stand.
The course did look rather hairy from the start, but didn't change so the event should have continued or been stopped before when it became clear it was unsafe.

I think it was less safe later in the race. I watched it on TV at the top of a mountain about 10km from Kitz. The early starters would have have no/little new snow, as it only started to snow after the race had started. (That could have been slightly different in Kitz. The later snow was not too heavy, but the visabilty was bad anyway.

The numbers of accidents was not particularly high from my recollection of previous years, but it was unfortunate that the injuries were season ending. Most racers just clatter into the safety nets and swear a lot.

The racers know how important Kitz is to both the sport and to the individuals, so just get on with it.

I rarely experience fear when skiing, but my stomach still knots up when I recall skiing across the steepest elements of the Streif, just after the completion of a race. It was very, very steep, sheet ice, and if you had fallen, you would have hit Kitzbuhel at 90 mph. Can't remember how I got out of it, but I learned a lot about skiing that day....