Sociology

Daredevils risk their lives on the ski slope

You see them leaping from skyscrapers with parachutes strapped to their backs, clinging to ice-covered slopes with their bare hands, or hurtling into churning white water. What makes extreme sports nuts tick? They like taking risks, says Linda Paquette, who is currently writing a Ph.D. thesis on the topic in the Department of Psychology at the Université de Montréal. “In a society where the vast majority of the population takes physical comfort for granted, staring death in the face provides an incomparable sensation.”

In her study – the first research in Canada to look at young people who take risks by engaging in extreme sports – Paquette took statements from 685 young people between the ages of 14 and 19 who live near major ski centres in the Laurentians and Quebec City areas. Highly detailed questionnaires provided valuable information on their extreme sports habits. “I concentrated on snowboarding,” says the Ph.D. candidate. “I wanted to find out what’s different about athletes who are included to take a high level of risk, while others are content with more conventional practices.”

Snowboarding is a sport that’s growing in popularity in Quebec. However, according to statistics from the Institut national de santé publique du Québec, the new sport accounts for nearly 10% of traumatic injuries caused by sports and recreational activities, and that rate is rising.  Snowboarders are urged to follow safety rules on the slopes, but many seem to think that breaking the rules adds a further element of challenge… “The biggest surprise for us when we saw the responses was how prevalent drug use is among snowboarders. Approximately 30% of the respondents said they had practiced their sport under the influence of cannabis at least once over the past 12 months. That’s not a scientifically representative statistic for the overall population, but the result is clear. It seems enormous.”

“Extreme” snowboarders seem to be partial to spectacular exploits, and four in 10, according to Paquette’s figures, have friends capture the descent on film. “I think that our society puts a premium on risk-taking. You can see it in commercials, at the movies and on TV. Young people are easily influenced,” she notes. “If you want to paint a portrait of the typical extreme athlete, it’s a man in his prime, self-confident, with friends who also practice extreme sports, psychologically stable, an extrovert looking for a feeling of self-determination, mastery, satisfaction and excitement that his environment fails to give him in socially acceptable ways,” Paquette wrote in her doctoral presentation. “Far from seeing risk as a danger, he sees it as a challenge, an ordeal he evaluates carefully before embarking on it.”

The student, whose Ph.D. is being jointly supervised by Jacques Bergeron (Department of Psychology) and Éric Lacourse (Department of Sociology), is currently at the data analysis stage. She began by conducting an exhaustive review of the literature that revealed fundamental differences between various extreme sports. “Some people take risks to stimulate their self-esteem. For them, each challenge demonstrates the success they’re capable of achieving. For others, risk-taking is a way of avoiding problems. According to our data, those in the second group are more likely to consume psychotropic drugs, probably for the same reasons.”

For some young people, the two emotional regulation mechanisms coexist. The risk-taker who’s an “achievement seeker” supplants the other (the “problem-avoider) according to the mood of the moment. “When we take the observation further, we find many disparities within these categories.”