So far I serve in the US Navy currently Facilitating Leadership courses to sailors who are at the first-level of leadership and management.
I have taught thousands of motorcyclists to ride more skillfully. When I started motorcycle training in 1996 I considered myself as did my fellow instructors a Motorcycle "Safety" Instructor. Over the last 3 or 4 years I have renounced my ability to make riders safe and settle for make them better riders. The only thing I do to make riders more safe is to discourage them from riding and to wear appropriate gear for the sport of motorcycling.
As I read your some of your correspondence to Dr. Neill, I realize that by now you may be thinking motorcycling is not an extreme sport. I would agree if everyone on the road was a motorcyclist but mixing cars, trucks, bicycles, and pedestrians with motorcycles all using the same road make it an extreme sport. A friend of mine compared motorcycling with cars on the road to playing golf at a gun club.
Challenge and acceptance of risk are fantastically fun and allow us to accomplish more than me think we can. The problem is in training organizations and advertising we routinely make the claim that taking on risk can be done safely. I believe any word added to the words safe or safety is an instant oxymoron. In Fact Safe should stand for "Selling A Fictitious Environment" because you can sell anything if you claim it makes people safe or Safer.
The dictionary defines safe as an "absence of risk" or "free from harm or risk" The thing that extreme sportsman get is that safe and safety are not the goal. In fact in extreme sports the participant try to out do the level of risk of their peers. They are risk junkies.
I saw a quote from the supreme court recently where even they could not understand the concept the quote was from 1972 they stated "Safety is not the same as risk free".
In my opinion all of the greatest leaders in all the great societies clearly understood the difference between safety and risk. I suspect that if statistics were gathered about the success of the "best" extreme sport participants that there success in other endeavors would be similar to there sporting experience and they would excel.
©2004 Mark C. Carroll
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