This article makes it sound like mountain biking is riskier than hockey (in terms of spinal cord injuries), but without relative participation rates, one cannot draw that conclusion.
As someone who played and still loves hockey, I wouldn't put hockey that high up on the list of sports that result in spinal cord injuries compared to other contact sports.
Spinal cord injuries absolutely happen, but I can think of plenty of sports that would have a higher incident e.g., surfing, skateboarding, motocross, horseback riding, gymnastics, cheer leading, etc..
It looks riskier than football - the article compared armature football in the US (the entire country) to just BC and find mountain biking worse. Football is not a safe sport (though they use a lot of safety gear in all the organized versions). BC is where people into mountain biking travel to so I'm not sure how much the BC stats are comparing the world.
That comparison feels like it's missing a "spinal cord injuries" qualifier, because it doesn't pass the smell test for "all injuries". Roughly a million kids play high school football every year, which is 20% of the population of BC. Many of those will have some small injury over the course of the year from football.
It makes more sense for spinal injuries, but even that doesn't make mountain biking more dangerous than football (spinal injuries are relatively rare in football, but head trauma is common).
Well this is about major life changing injuries. Break a leg and 6 months latter you are back doing whatever you did before. Injury your spinal cord and you controlling your wheelchair with your mouth (or other awkward contraption) for the rest of your life.
American football is played by a lot more kids than who mountain bike in just BC and isn't nearly as bad. (though some of the injuries from football to have lifelong effects that we are only now realizing)
Also, less correlation between skill and risk in mountain biking. If you can ride a bike, you can ride a bike fast enough to do spinal damage in a crash. If you can skate, it's still a lot of practice before you're skating fast enough for your contribution to a crash to be risky.
Fair, but my intuition would say in Canada, hockey is more popular than mountain biking, I would even be willing to put money on saying "considerably more popular" to be honest. Hockey Canada reported 600,000 registered Hockey Players in 2019, Cycle Canada reported 22,000 in 2018.
58 mountain biking SCIs over 14 years (4.1 per year) in British Columbia
3 hockey SCIs over the same period (0.21 per year) in British Columbia
I'm not from Canada and I don't play hockey, but as a mountain biker, I don't see a reason why I'd register for anything anywhere. It isn't even a team sport, you can bike completely alone without a single person even knowing about it.
There is also a significant amount of personal risk tolerance involved. Casual riders can certainly have severe injuries, but easier trails are indeed easier.
I think it's way easier to get in over your head mountain biking than playing hockey.
A casual hockey player finding themselves in a way too kinetic game of pickup can nope-out pretty quickly, or likely won't ever get into the situation.
A casual mountain biker can go on a casual mountain bike ride with his brother and find himself way over his head, then bouncing down the trail on his head, very quickly and without an obvious offramp. Ask me how I know... ;)
I empathize because I literally just finished healing from an injury that came within millimeters of killing me because I followed someone into an area that I wasn't prepared for. The first hospital I went to, after doing X-rays said I needed a level one trauma center and called an ambulance to take me to Seattle harbor view.
I broke the cardinal rule of new technical terrain: pre-ride, re-ride, freeride. You get off your bike and walk the feature to see how approachable and rollable it might be. Then you session it (ride just that one feature). Then you ride through it quickly as part of a longer trail.
I went 5 years without an injury. This one healed in 3 months. I believe I know what I did wrong and can fairly easily avoid making that same mistake again. Do I expect zero injuries in the future? No.
What I expect is years at a time of an activity that very much enriches my life, with occasional injuries. Hopefully more than 5 years at a time since I'm making changes to avoid repeating the same mistake.
And I wish people knew that downhill mountain biking is a lot like downhill skiing. You can take the greens down or you can yeet yourself off something that's tougher than a double black diamond. I've gone on many group mountain bike rides with people in their 70s. So like skiing it is something you can shoot for doing into your old age.
