Roller Skating Since Its Booming

Roller Skating Since its booming popularity in the 1950s, until today's inline varieties, roller skating has been one of the most popular recreational activities in the United States and perhaps around the world. Yet even highly skilled roller skaters get into accidents. Much of the time, roller skating accidents are minor, involving only a few minor cuts, scrapes, or bruises. However, sometimes skating accidents can be severe and even fatal, especially when the person skates in or near automobile traffic.

Moreover, many have taken inline skating to the "extreme," and perform stunts that vastly increase risk of severe injury. Most skating accidents can be prevented by using caution and common sense, but accidents can, do, and will happen. When they do, their severity can be considerably minimized by wearing simple and inexpensive protective gear such as elbow and knee pads and bicycle helmets. Brightly colored clothing and strategically placed reflectors can also be worn at night or in shady spots to increase visibility and help prevent car-related accidents.

While wearing protective gear will not prevent accidents in the first place, gear will reduce the risk of severe injury by protecting the skater's most vulnerable body parts. The argument in favor of wearing protective gear is therefore a highly plausible one, based on statistical fact and common sense. When a skater does not don protective equipment, he or she increases the risk of being injured due to exposed and vulnerable body parts like hands, elbows, knees, ankles, and head.

For example, when falling, a person's natural instinct is to stretch out the hands to break a fall. The hands have little fat or flesh to protect them, and are therefore one of the most vulnerable parts of a skater's anatomy. Without a wrist guard, a skater can easily sprain his or her wrist in the same manner. By wearing light gloves, an individual can still rely on his or her hands to break a fall, but the gloves reduce the chance of severe scrapes or burns.

Wearing wrist guards also reduces the chance that the skater sprains his or her wrist when attempting to break a fall. According to Schieber and Branche-Dorsey (1995), "wrist guards are virtually completely protective against lacerations, sprains and strains, and that they reduce the overall odds of sustaining any wrist injury more than 6-fold." Thus, the gear might not prevent the accident from occurring but it does decrease its severity.

In a similar fashion, wearing ankle and knee protection reduces the chance of sprains and bruises in those areas on the body when the skater falls. All skaters will eventually fall; wearing gear is the only way to reduce the severity of impact. Basically, if two skaters fall in exactly the same way, the one wearing gear will suffer fewer scrapes, burns, scratches, or sprains.

In the same way that safety belts reduce the chances of being severely injured in a car crash, protective gear such as elbow and knee pads reduce the chance of severe injury in a skating accident. Especially when skaters fall on asphalt or concrete, the elbows, knees, and hands are the first to be roughed up by the harsh pavement material. Based on hospital statistics, three-quarters of skaters who enter emergency rooms following an accident had not been wearing protective gear.

These statistics show that while the gear does not in itself prevent accidents, it can and does reduce the severity of skating-related accidents. "Road rash," while a minor injury, can be minimized or prevented altogether by wearing simple gear such as light gloves, elbow, and knee pads. The gear serves basically as a prophylactic. More severe bodily or head injuries can be significantly minimized or prevented by the skater's wearing a bicycle-style helmet or reflective gear.

Because so many roller skating accidents do occur in the street or in parking lots, wearing gear that specifically addresses issues like visibility can prevent the severity of an accident involving a moving automobile. Skaters who skate in traffic, even slow-moving traffic in parking lots, increase their risk of sever injury due to impact with a car. Those same skaters minimize their chances of being severely injured by donning simple gear. Few plausible arguments could be made to counter one in favor of protective gear for roller skaters.

Some arguments against wearing such gear include that one that "extreme" sports enthusiasts who don protective gear might end up taking more risks than they would have otherwise. However, no evidence suggests this to be true, and it is more likely that skaters who enjoy taking risks would do so whether or not they wear protective equipment. A second argument against wearing protective gear would be aesthetics.

Some skaters might feel embarrassed by appearing so padded; to counter their assertion footage of professional football or hockey players will show that some of the world's most talented and strong athletes have no problem donning protective gear, gear that is considerably bulkier and less attractive than the light gear that skaters would wear. There is nothing "cool" about becoming comatose, and therefore protective gear enhances a roller skater's sport by decreasing his or her risk of being laid up for life.

When considered as a whole, arguments against wearing protective gear are rhetorically and scientifically weak. On the other hand, arguments in favor of roller skaters wearing protective gear are based on sound facts, reason, experience, and common sense. For instance, hospital statistics show that seventy-five percent of roller skaters who had accidents in the street or in a parking lot were not wearing any protective gear.

Of the twenty-five percent that were wearing protective equipment and were still severely injured, their accidents might have been even grimmer had they not worn gear at all. A person flying head-first into pavement will get hurt whether or not they wear a helmet: but when all things are equal, a helmet will greatly reduce head injuries. The laws of physics as well as statistics are on the side of wearing protective gear.

Moreover, analogies can be made with similar safety issues such as seat belts, professional sports like football or hockey, or even with safe sex. For example, wearing a condom does not guarantee one hundred percent protection against sexually transmitted diseases or pregnancy, but condoms definitely and significantly reduce the risk of both. A roller skater does not need to invest in top-of -- the line gear, but generally cheaper materials do not offer the same level of protection as higher-quality equipment or at least equipment that fits the wearer.

According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, in 1995 there were approximately 105,000 in-line skating related injuries requiring hospital emergency room.