Spacemonkey! said...
Apply the same theme to car crash victims. There would be a comparable number of drivers out there in there first year of driving as their second and third. But then you get to the 4+ bracket and you got a much larger group of people.
Sorry Spacemonkey but that is a nonsensical comparison. The total number of car drivers would have been almost the same number over all 4+ years. Did all 200,000 people start kitesurfing the first year that kite-surfing began? I don't think so.
To make that claim you need to know how many people are in each bracket and find the percentage chance for each individual group rather piling them all together. Your comparing oranges to apples.
Spacemonkey, these stats are from 2006. Kitesurfing began around 2000. The point I'm trying to make is that those people with 6 years of experience (at the time the stats were collated) for example would have joined the sport in the first year or so - a time when there were far fewer kiters (a few thousand perhaps?) in the world compared to 6 or so years later in 2006 when the numbers had swelled to around 200,000).
Likewise those with 5 years and 4 years experience would have begun either in the 1st year or in the 2nd or 3rd year of the sport and again would be significantly less than the total number of kiters in the sixth year of the sport.
It also means that for a 6 year veteran to have been killed, it would have had to have happened in the sixth year of the sport (2006). In contrast for a beginner to have been killed that could have occurred anytime over that entire 6 year period.
To put it more simply - there could have only been say a few thousand 6 year veterans in 2006 vs some 200,000 people who at one time or other were in the 1st year category.
Remember, every 6yr veteran was also a beginner once so over that 6 year period:
total 1st year kiters = 200,000 = 100% of 200,000
total 6yr kiters = a few thousand perhaps = maybe 1% of 200,000 (pure estimate here, but you get the picture)
I would still guess that based on the fact that kiting is supposed to be the fastest growing sport in the world and that to my knowledge we are still in the initial exponential part of the bell curve, that even combined, the total number of kiters with 6, 5 or 4 years experience would have still been less than the overall total number of kiters (who would all have had less than 1 year of experience at some point).
As such, for such a small segment of the kiting population to have suffered such a large proportion of the fatalities is pretty significant.
You are right that we need more detailed stats to be really definitive about this, but I think we can be pretty safe saying that there is an unexpectedly large proportion of veteran kiters dying and to me that says :
1. It's not mainly newbies not knowing what they are doing that are getting killed
2. Years of experience do not automatically mean you are safe and if anything it may make you take more risks with resultant lethal consequences.
*phew* now I'm exhausted!
Now sure we could all go sit on the couch (or go windsurfing
) instead, or as chriskay suggested, we could all learn from what went wrong for those poor deceased or badly injured kiters and perhaps avoid becoming a statistic ourselves.
-Mart
