There exists a wide spectrum of injuries from snowboarding, ranging from common extremity injuries to potentially life-threatening nonorthopedic trauma.

These findings suggest that off-road bicyclists whose mechanism of injury involves falling forward over the handlebars are at risk for more severe injury, especially to the head and neck.

This study was conducted to investigate injury patterns at three major off-road bicycle races in the Western United States in 1995. All cyclists forced out of the cross-country (CC) and downhill (DH) competitions due to injury were examined and interviewed. The overall injury rates were 0.49% (20/4074) for the CC and 0.51% (11/2158) for the DH event. In the CC there were 0.37 injured cyclists for every 100 h of racing time versus 4.34 injured cyclists/100 h in the DH (P = 0.01). Injury rates in the CC were higher for women than for men (1.05% vs 0.40%, P = 0.04; 0.75/100 h vs 0.31/100 h, P = 0.01). Injured CC cyclists who fell forward over their handlebars had higher mean injury severity scores (3.0 vs 1.3, P = 0.01) and required more emergency room visits (6/100 vs 1/10, P = 0.02) than cyclists who fell off their bicycles (5/6 vs 5/14, P = 0.05) and were taken to the hospital (4/6 vs 3/14, P = 0.05) more often than men. These data suggest that 1) the risk of being injured during a race is similar in the CC And DH events, 2) the long-term risk may be greater to DH racers than to CC competitors, 3) the severity of injury is greater when a CC cyclists falls forward off the bicycle, and 4) women CC competitors are more likely to fall forward off their bicycles and be injured than men.