In the last 25 years, I’ve been covering ski racing, I find myself asking this every year: Does it seem there are more injuries than usual? But this year, injury reports are so frequent that my list has more than 50 World Cup names on it. While that’s still lower than the annual average, we’re barely halfway through the year.  What’s more is that many of the very best skiers are getting injured. The implication seems to be that there might be no immunity, certainly when you consider the injury of last year’s Overall winner, Alexander Aamodt Kilde. Regarded by many as maybe the strongest, fittest athlete to ever have ski raced, Kilde tore his ACL mid-January, in what looked like an innocuous fall. Other World Cup winners or podium skiers that have been injured between summer and now include Thomas Dressen, Joseph Ferstl, Brice Roger, Mauro Caviezel, Ryan Cochrane Siegle, Tommy Ford, Lucas Bratthen, Sofia Goggia, Nicole Schmidhoffer, Wendy Hoeldener, Bernadette Schild, Alice McKennis Duran, Jackie Wiles, Laurenne Ross, Nicole Delago, Anna Swenn-Larsson, Nina Ortlieb, Romed Baumann and of course Ted Ligety, whose career ended on injury.

There many more.

So, I turned to someone who might be able to put some of this into perspective. My guest, Troy Taylor, is the High-Performance Director for the US Ski Team. He’s been paying close attention to the injuries and has some eye-opening insights. Like the fact that half of all injuries happen in races despite the fact 90 percent of their time, at least, is spent training. Furthermore, those racing injuries happen where training rarely take them, in the final stretch of full-length race runs. Then, once injured, the likelihood of re-injury increases significantly, and that holds true for up to 2 years after the initial injury.

Our sport, as you might already have suspected, is about as dangerous as non-contact sports get, but maybe just by changing some of our habits, we might find some relief. Just listen …