I'm not sure where but we've had a similar discussion about career lenght over time somewhere here
And I know that among several others, @eppen was involved (sorry to ping you once again).
Maybe also others can find the thread or have some insights/numbers.
The data will be skewed toward skaters who continued to skate despite catastrophic injuries, because there is only data for these athletes. Many, many more children would drop after age 12 due to puberty changes, not catastrophic traumas. The data will be strongly skewed based on sex of the athlete, because peak physical ability window for FS is not the same for women and men. Gender is a complicated issue, so social relaity, cometitive pressures and physiological demands are different for men and women, even in different disciplines--and i have a feeling you are onky focusing on singles, which will also introduce bias. A relatively small injury could stop someone or their parents from pursuing the career. In other words, I expect any study like this to be inconclusive. Particularly because leet figure skaters are a tiny sample, even at 12, so every decision to compete or quit is basically individual. I also doubt that data on mortality or permanent disability is made public and that’s the only data that is not anecdotal.I wanted to see how many athletes who as early teens, let's say at the age of about 12, are seen as having the quality to be top level skaters, are able to continue their career past the age of ~22. Are there any actual statistics/ databases? I know it's a difficult thing to define exactly which skater stopped due to an injury, but I was about to look more into this topic and thought others might have already done that... so... do you know of any overviews in that direction?
Like I added, eepin showed in that old thread, that successful skaters both started earlier, won earlier and stayed longer, were succeful for longer than average in general. So early age and injuries were not a deterrent to success and longer career per se. Talent saw them through. However, he is also watching the careers of new generation who start jumping quads earlier to see if early quad in competition has any statistical impact on career length. That's overfixating on just one thing, because people tend to overfixate on the danger of quads, and it doesn't take into account the changes to the society since the 90s, where there is less opportunities for skaters or incentives to continue past entry to college unless they are medal contenders in major competitions.
When I googled FS injury statistics, it gave me this:
an article that puts skating injuries in context with other sports injuries
an article about self-reported FS injuries in US
a review of literature about FS injuries, basically this is a list of research done on this topic (in English);
oh, and this was a good one from Sports Medicine, just a general review of FS injuries - what are they and how often do they happen.
I realized that people do care about FS injuries and that their concern is how to keep people healthy and not that much concern about their carriers... and that they might possibly be right
