INTRODUCTION: In skicross, the number and severity of injuries are among the highest and most serious in winter sports [1]. The specific aspect of skicross is the head-to-head racing during the finals and the course, which is made up of different types of obstacles. Previous research has linked injuries to three types of obstacles (jumps, turns and rollers) and the injuries were primarily caused by unintentional contact between skiers and personal error [2,3]. To provide a more comprehensive picture of the factors that might lead to injuries, this study assumed that surrogate measures of injury risk (hereafter named "events"), such as crashes, are related to actual injury risk. Based on this assumption this study investigated how course characteristics affected these injury risk metrics for women and men. METHODS: During the 2023/24 season the connection between injury risk events and course characteristics were evaluated across five World Cup races (Innichen, Alleghe, St. Moritz, Reiteralm and Veysonnaz). For that purpose, human reviewers utilized TV footage of all final heats, for men and women, to pinpoint the location of such events. Crashing was defined as the event with the closest relation to true injuries, while out of balance, contacts and avoided contacts between athletes were defined as potential pre-conditions of crashing. The geometric attributes of the World Cup courses were logged using differential GNSS, facilitating the creation of digital terrain models, that were used to determine the nature and location of obstacles. RESULTS/DISCUSSION: Men had more contacts, avoided contacts and out of balance events than women, while women and men had the same number of crashes. For women, the occurrence of crashes was the same for each type of obstacle, whereas for men most crashes occurred in turns. Women most often crashed with an out of balance event as a prerequisite, while for men the combination of an out of balance event and contact with another skier most often caused a crash. CONCLUSION: Since women usually crash without interference to other skiers, the technical difficulty of the course itself seems to cause crashes while men seem to have a higher capacity to recover from out of balance and contact events than women. Since the courses are used by women and men, they need to be designed so that they are not too difficult for women but still challenging for men.
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