Remembering Ryan Hawks: Victim to the imminent risk in extreme sports
Due to the immense risk involved in action sports, coming across tragic news about the death of an athlete while following his passion is not uncommon. However, every single loss of life comes as a real shock and creates an air of melancholy within the action
sports community. One such tragic loss of life was that of professional freeskier, Ryan Hawks.
The 25-year-old Utah based athelete had been addicted to big mountain skiing since his first experience at Tuckerman’s ravine at the age of nine. Belonging to a group of Vermont-born athletes known as Green Mountain Freeride, he spent most of his time skiing
with his friends and fellow Mad River Glen athletes, Lars and Silas Chickering-Ayers.
He continued to pursue this passion as he grew up. He was an engineering student at the University of Vermont and in order to pursue skiing full-time in winter, he had gotten himself enrolled in the summer and fall semesters. He had just signed a professional
contract with the Blizzard/Technica pro team last year.
His positive and friendly attitude had earned him a lot of respect in the ski community. While talking about his close friend, Lars Chickering-Ayers said Hawks was undoubtedly one of the happiest persons that he’d ever met. He brought this aura of happiness
along with him into the ski community and was therefore loved by everyone he met. He was simply optimistic about everything.
The line of work that Hawks had chosen for himself may have brought him years of joy and fulfilment but it eventually stripped him of it all, taking more than it had granted him.
Hawks was participating in the Subaru North American Freeskiing Championship at Kirkwood Ski Resort near Lake Tahoe on February 27 earlier this year. A lot of skiers were failing to make successful landings after their tricks. Hawks, adept at throwing back
flips, decided to capitalise on the opportunity by going all out in order to secure a place on the podium. He smoothly and confidently threw off a back-flip off a 40-foot cliff but failed to make a clean landing like those before him and ended up crashing.
In contrast to the aftermath of the crashes by the other skiers, he laid completely motionless on the spot.
Ski patrol immediately rushed over to him to tend to his injuries. The injuries turned out to be critical so he was rushed to Reno’s Renown Health Centre in a helicopter, where he got admitted to the Intensive Care Unit to be treated for internal injuries.
Two days later on March 1, Dan Davis, spokesperson for Renown Health, confirmed Hawks death.
Chris Tatsuno, who was a fellow competitor and friend of Hawks, was in tears as he talked about the accident that led to his friend’s demise, “Some of the other guys who hit the same air as Hawks, they landed right at the base of the cliff, so in deep snow.
And Hawks came in hot enough to throw a back-flip and enough to get it around and land it to his feet. But from the photos I’ve seen, he was easily another 10 feet down from the other guys’ landings. So maybe it was harder snow there.”
The young pro-skier’s death was indeed a sad reminder of the risk that exists in extreme sports. While the popularity of this rather unconventional branch of sports is growing day by day, we hope that adequate attention is being given to improve safety measures
in order to reduce, if not completely eliminate, the risk of fatalities.
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