Before 2009: very few adult skiers in Austria and Germany wore helmets, pretty much only the racers and children who were legally required to. I felt like a dork wearing mine, but I experienced a scary near-miss my first season on these relatively crowded slopes.

After 2009: at least 80% of adult skiers in Austria and Germany wear helmets, from the looks of things. Most frequent non-wearers are very old, permanently tanned Austrian men who literally have 5000+ ski days behind them or young ladies with nicely-done hair and make-up much more interested in getting good pictures for Instagram than actually skiing.

What happened in 2009? The Ministerpräsident (think US state governor) of Thuringia, Dieter Althaus, was flying down a black (expert) slope, turned onto a blue (beginner) slope with enough momentum behind him to go up it and crash into a lady from Slovakia.

He was in the hospital for weeks, living to earn a criminal judgment for negligent homicide, paying tens of thousands of Euro.

She died on the way to the hospital.

He was wearing a helmet.

She wasn't.

The absolute crush of helmet sales then and continued rates since are sometimes called the "Althaus-Effekt".

That's also the year Natasha Richardson died from a head injury she received while skiing. That was all over the news (at least in the US/Canada, and probably England).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natasha_Richardson#Injury_and_...

Interesting. I wonder if these 2009 events were a turning point worldwide. I recently returned to downhill skiing after last skiing in the 90s, and was absolutely shocked by the number of skiers wearing helmets. Like 90-95%. Whereas when I skied as a young man in the 90s, it was something like 0-2% (basically only a handful of children). The skier side of my brain still can’t get used to the idea of wearing one of these ridiculous things, but then again the logical side of my brain points out that I wear a helmet while cycling so it makes sense. Almost everything else about downhill skiing is pretty much the same today (the skis are shorter and fatter for some reason), but the helmet wearing was a massive sea change that happened without me.

For some reason you say? I don't think you could make a circle on the (empty, of course) slope with older skis :)

I cracked two helmets hitting my head on iced slopes. Every time I was able to stand back up (although dizzy and with a headache) and bless my initiative to wear a helmet. As they say, your mileage may vary.