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Tract 12 lists sixteen sins and the fifteenth is "risking life for thrills — skydiving, free climbing, etc." Tract 13 turns it into an instruction: "before you sign up for an extracurricular, look up the risk of death or serious injury from that extracurricular," and adds that not looking it up "falls in the same category" of sin. Nobody has done the lookup. The tracts name the obvious cases, the ones with a parachute or a cliff in them, and the obvious cases turn out to be a small and badly chosen sample. On the numbers, the hobby most likely to put an American in a grave this year is the motorcycle in the garage, the one most likely to put a child in a neck brace is the trampoline in the yard, the one most likely to drown a toddler is the pool, and the school sport with the worst catastrophic-injury record for girls is cheerleading, which the corpus does name, once, in a chapter about marriage contracts (TPG 47.4.1). This page is the lookup the tract asks for: every common recreation that carries a real chance of death or life-changing injury, in one unit, on one ladder, with the source for every number, the baselines that make the numbers mean something, and the substitutions the corpus itself proposes (BASE jumping to a cold plunge; crew to an outrigger canoe; a skydive to leaning into a strong wind) checked against the same data. It is not scripture work. The tract says plainly that this is "an entirely new category of sinfulness that the Bible didn't even know it needed to warn us about," and its only scriptural anchor is wisdom literature: "the prudent see danger and take refuge, but the simple keep going and pay the penalty" (Proverbs 22:3, quoted in TP 35.0.5). So the evidence here is actuarial, not textual, and it is graded the way the scripture pages grade verses: what the number actually says, what it is a rate of, and where the corpus has overclaimed.
The tracts behind this page are Tract 12, "We Need More Sins" (watch · read, TP 35.0.3), and Tract 13, "Sins Aren't Equal: Ranking Activities' Sinfulness" (watch · read, TP 35.0.5 · the same episode as TPS 53.1 · Substack).
The corpus has put this rule down in four places and illustrated it with the same three or four hobbies every time. Tract 12 gives the sin its name and its examples, "skydiving, free climbing, etc.," and then, closing the list, calls it "one of the biggest potential sins... risking a human's life for happiness or a thrill or for some emotional subset... skydiving, bungee jumping, free climbing, anything where you are putting your own life at risk meaninglessly for just a thrill" (TP 35.0.3). Tract 13 builds the ranking machine the sin sits inside: every indulgence is scored on time flexibility, cost per hour of enjoyment, "the probability that it's going to kill you," escalation risk, externalities on other people and addiction potential, and the death column dominates, because a death "has enormous externalities on everyone that's counting on you and your ability to do anything in the future" (TP 35.0.5). The same tract splits the health damage into two buckets: "chronically bad," which is gluttony and sleep debt and the overwork Simone accuses Malcolm of on air, and "acutely bad... the risk of death or severe injury," which is this page. The Pragmatist's Guide names the hobbies it has in mind when it tells couples how to write a contract: "base jumping, bull riding, cheerleading, racing motorcycles," where a partner who wants you to quit "is the only thing standing between them and death / serious injury" (TPG 47.4.1). And the Oath of Preservation puts the accidental death on the same moral shelf as the deliberate one: letting yourself be killed through a failure of self-protection "rests on your soul... in the same way an unaliving is, in the same way self-harm is, in the same way a skydiving accident is, which we consider quite sinful" (TP 35.0.5).
Four statements, one rule, and no table. The examples are what a well-read person reaches for when asked to name a dangerous hobby, which is to say they are the hobbies with the best publicity, not the ones with the worst numbers. Skydiving has killed about ten Americans a year for the last decade out of several million jumps; motorcycles kill about six thousand. Crew, which Tract 13 holds up as an "extremely high injury sport," is one of the lowest-injury sports there is, and the mechanism the tract describes for it is not in the injury literature. Meanwhile the activities with the actual bodies attached, the trampoline, the ATV, the horse, the pool, the e-scooter, the tree stand, the diving board, are never named at all, because nobody thinks of them as thrill-seeking. The tract's own instruction is the fix: look it up. This page is the lookup, done once, with the sources, so the next person can check it instead of redoing it.
Quoted rather than summarised, because the wording settles several questions the tables have to answer: whether it is the probability that matters or the mere possibility; whether purpose changes the grade; and whether ignorance is a defence.
"15. Risking life for thrills — skydiving, free climbing, etc."The sin list, Tract 12 (TP 35.0.3)
"The final one I'd include here is one of the biggest potential sins, is risking a human's life for happiness or a thrill or for some emotional subset... this also includes things like skydiving, bungee jumping, free climbing, anything where you are putting your own life at risk meaninglessly for just a thrill."Tract 12 (TP 35.0.3). The operative word is meaninglessly: the rule is about needless risk, not risk.
"Another thing we need to keep in mind in sort of the grand ranking of sins is the probability that it's going to kill you. Because that has enormous externalities on everyone that's counting on you and your ability to do anything in the future."Tract 13 (TP 35.0.5). Probability, not possibility: the rule asks for a number, and the number is a rate.
"Suppose you're in school and you're choosing your sport. Something that you should be very aware of in that choice is what is the chance that this could give you a life-changing injury... you should, before you sign up for an extracurricular, look up the risk of death or serious injury from that extracurricular... actively choosing not to look this stuff up falls in the same category."Tract 13 (TP 35.0.5). Two things follow: injury short of death counts, and ignorance is itself the sin.
"The highest category of sin within these activities is anything that could just kill you. Like, in terms of BASE jumping, parachuting out of an airplane, hang gliding, hot air ballooning... personal plane flying. Like is there really not some other activity that you could get the same amount of marginal enjoyment from that doesn't run the risk of just killing you? And also isn't worth tons of money."Tract 13 (TP 35.0.5). The substitution test, which this page applies to every row.
"People in the past didn't randomly do stuff for fun that could get them killed for no reason. This is like a modern invention of sinfulness that we just invented out of the ethos... we invented an entirely new category of sinfulness that the Bible didn't even know it needed to warn us about."Tract 13 (TP 35.0.5). Why this is not a scripture page. The verses the tract then reaches for are Proverbs 22:3 and 14:16, prudence texts, not law.
"I'd actually maybe a billionfold less bad to spend a night playing video games than it is to skydive or free climb or any of those things that have these giant externalities to your life. Because there is no chance that I accidentally kill myself playing a video game."Tract 13 (TP 35.0.5). The zero of the scale: the ladder below starts at the sofa.
"Every time you get in a car, you're risking your life. And that's why I think it's generally good to like cluster those things, and... when you think about the car you get, it's upon you to research what is the riskiness of this car to your life."Tract 13 (TP 35.0.5). The baseline the tract itself names, and the one every row below is measured against.
"Taking like a skydiving or BASE jumping addiction and turning it into a cold plunge addiction, right? You're taking a vice and turning it into a virtue while still getting the thing, like most of the thing out of the vice that you liked."Simone Collins, Tract 13 (TP 35.0.5). The swap principle: keep the feeling, drop the funeral. Exhibit F checks the swaps she names against the data, including the cold plunge.
"Going out and doing something just to see if you like it when it would be a net negative to your life to find out you like that thing. This includes things like skydiving, free climbing, gang bangs, gambling... 'I tried heroin to see if I enjoyed it.' Just don't do it."Tract 12 (TP 35.0.3). The "one tandem jump" and the "just one lap" are covered.
"For many people suffering from addiction or involved in other potentially dangerous hobbies (e.g., base jumping, bull riding, cheerleading, racing motorcycles, etc.), the presence of a partner who cares about them enough to want them to drop that dangerous behavior is the only thing standing between them and death / serious injury."The Pragmatist's Guide to Relationships (TPG 47.4.1). The one place the corpus names a non-obvious case, and it is cheerleading.
Rude conclusion first. The sin as written is about needless risk of death or life-changing injury, measured as a probability, with a duty to find the probability out. Three things follow that the tract's own examples do not reflect. First, by the count of bodies, the most dangerous common recreations in America are not the sky sports but the ones with an engine under you: a motorcycle, an ATV, a snowmobile, a boat without a life jacket, and now the e-bike. Second, the "life-changing injury" clause pulls in a whole class of activities that almost never kill but reliably break necks and spines, and that class is dominated by things sold to children: trampolines, cheerleading, diving into shallow water, football. Third, several of the tract's named examples are, on the modern numbers, less dangerous per outing than the drive to the drop zone, which does not make them innocent (the rule asks whether a safer substitute gives the same enjoyment, and for a skydive it does) but does mean the list has to be rebuilt from the data rather than from reputation.
The unit. A micromort is a one-in-a-million chance of dying (Ronald Howard, 1980; popularised by Spiegelhalter and Blastland, The Norm Chronicles, 2013). It is used here because it lets a single jump, an hour on a bike, a season on a team and a day of being alive sit in one column. Where the source gives deaths per 100,000 participants or per 100 million miles, the conversion is shown so it can be checked.
Rate of what. Every number is a rate, and the denominator decides the ranking. Per exposure (one jump, one dive, one ride) favours activities you do rarely; per hour favours activities that are over quickly; per participant-year buries the risk of a thing you do every weekend. The tables show the denominator in every row and, where the sources allow, convert to a common per-hour figure. Where a number is contested or thin, the row says so instead of smoothing it. Where the only honest figure is "deaths per year in the US," the row says that too, and gives a participation estimate so the reader can see what it is divided by.
Death and life-changing injury are two columns, not one. Tract 13 asks for both ("the risk of death or serious injury") and they do not track each other. Skydiving kills and rarely maims; trampolines maim and rarely kill. "Serious injury" is read here as the catastrophic end of the distribution: spinal cord injury, severe traumatic brain injury, amputation, permanent disability, the injuries the National Center for Catastrophic Sport Injury Research counts and the ones the tract means by "life-changing." Emergency-room visit counts are included because they are what exists for household equipment, but they are driven by participation (a hundred million people play basketball) and are flagged as such.
Meaninglessly. The sin is risk taken "meaninglessly for just a thrill." A motorcycle ridden to work, a horse ridden on a working ranch, a plane flown to reach a patient, a boat used to fish for food, a soldier's or firefighter's risk, a mother's risk in childbirth, the Oath of Preservation's risk of confronting an attacker: these carry the same actuarial numbers and are not this sin, because they are not for the thrill. The ledger prices the activity, not the motive; the reader supplies the motive. It does mean the same row can be a sin for one person and a duty for another, which Simone says in so many words about the family that lives next to the gymnastics gym (TP 35.0.5).
The substitution test. Tract 13's actual question is comparative: is there another activity that delivers the same marginal enjoyment without the mortality? So every row carries, where one exists, the swap the corpus names or the one the data suggests, and Exhibit F grades the swaps. A swap that keeps most of the feeling and drops most of the risk converts the sin into "a virtue" in Simone's phrase. A swap that does not exist (there is no low-risk BASE jump) leaves the row where it is.
What is not on the ladder. The chronic bucket, which Tract 13 files separately: gluttony, sleep debt, overwork, sexual disease risk, the steady damage of drink. They are sins in the corpus's scheme and they kill more people than everything on this page combined, but they are not this sin. One activity straddles the line and is printed with the seam showing: tackle football's acute catastrophic injuries are this page's business, and its chronic brain disease is the other bucket's. Also not here: occupational risk, war, crime, driving to work. The car appears only as the baseline, because the tract uses it as one.
Sources. Official bodies where they exist (the Consumer Product Safety Commission's injury surveillance system, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the Coast Guard, the Parachute Association, Divers Alert Network, the catastrophic-injury centre at Chapel Hill, American Whitewater, the avalanche centres), peer-reviewed epidemiology where they do not, and the micromort literature for the conversions. Every figure has its source in the row. Numbers were collected October 2026; the most recent available year is used and named.
Ranked by micromorts per outing, with the per-hour figure beside it where an outing has a sensible length, and the denominator stated in every row because it decides the ranking. The tract's named examples are marked (named). Read the "Reading" column as the tract's own test applied: the band, and then whether a substitute exists. Where the only honest number is a count of bodies with no denominator, the row says so; a page about looking things up has to be honest about what cannot be looked up, and the tract's duty to look it up is then a duty to treat the activity as unmeasured, not as safe.
| Activity | Fatality rate, with its denominator | Micromorts per outing · per hour | How people die | Source | Reading |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| OWN BAND — hundreds of micromorts or more per outing | |||||
| Annapurna I | 4.07% of members who went above base camp died, 1950–2019 (54 of 1,326); about 32 deaths per 100 summits | ≈40,700 per attempt | Avalanche | Himalayan Database, Himalaya by the Numbers 2nd ed., Table D-3; 8000ers.com | OWN BAND |
| K2 | 84 deaths against 367 summits through 2018 (23 per 100 summits); no per-climber rate exists for Pakistan | ≈230,000 per summit (per attempt lower; unknown) | Serac fall at the Bottleneck, avalanche, falls | Arnette 2018 compilation | OWN BAND |
| The 8,000 m peaks of Nepal, all | 1.58% of members above base camp died, 1950–2019 (506 of 32,119); 1.27% in 1990–2019; Dhaulagiri 3.0%, Kangchenjunga 3.2%, Manaslu 2.0%, Cho Oyu 0.6% | ≈12,700–15,800 per attempt | Avalanche, falls, altitude illness | Himalayan Database, Tables D-1, D-3 | OWN BAND |
| Everest | 1.0% of everyone above base camp 1921–2024 (309 of 30,385); 0.7% in 2007–24, paying members 1.0%, Sherpas 0.5%; 1.2 deaths per 100 summits recently; 18 deaths in 2023, a record | ≈7,000–10,000 per attempt ≈15–20 per hour over a 6–8 week expedition | Avalanche and icefall, falls, altitude illness, exhaustion on descent (56% of deaths above 8,000 m are on the way down) | Dodge et al. 2025; Firth et al., BMJ 2008; Huey et al., PLOS ONE 2020 | OWN BAND |
| Denali | 3.08 deaths per 1,000 summit attempts 1903–2006; 2 of 960 registered climbers in 2025 (2.1 per 1,000); five deaths by mid-June 2026 | ≈2,000–3,100 per attempt ≈8 per hour over 17 days | Falls below Denali Pass (45%), avalanche, crevasse, altitude | McIntosh et al. 2008; NPS Denali 2025 Mountaineering Summary | OWN BAND |
| Matterhorn · Mont Blanc | Matterhorn about 6 deaths a year 2003–13 on roughly 2,500–3,000 ascents; Mont Blanc 15–30 a year on over 20,000 attempts, with 102 deaths in the Grand Couloir alone 1990–2017 | ≈1,000–3,000 · ≈750–1,500 per ascent (thin: no official series) | Falls on the Hörnli ridge; rockfall in the Couloir; weather | Press compilations of Swiss and French figures | OWN BAND |
| BASE jumping (named) | One death per 2,317 jumps and one non-fatal accident per 254 (Kjerag, Norway, 20,850 jumps 1995–2005); 541 deaths worldwide since 1981, about 20–30 a year now; wingsuit flights were 61% of deaths 2007–17 | ≈430 per jump a jumper doing 100 a year runs ≈4% annual mortality | Object or ground strike (96%); low or no pull, bad exit | Søreide et al., J Trauma 2007; Mei-Dan et al. 2013; Bouchat & Brymer 2019; BASE Fatality List | OWN BAND — no substitute keeps the jump |
| Cave diving | One death per 3,286 dives in British sump diving 1980–2005; one per 14,789 for qualified divers, one per 1,003 for the unqualified | ≈300 per dive 70 qualified · 1,000 unqualified | Lost line, silt-out, gas exhaustion | Cave Diving Group (UK), "The learning curve" | OWN BAND |
| Alpine and roped rock climbing (outdoors) | 0.13 deaths per 1,000 climbing hours (Grand Teton, 1990, the only per-hour figure that exists); US fatalities historically 20–35 a year; rappelling and lowering errors are the recurring killer (5 deaths in 15 rappel incidents in the 2025 report) | ≈130 per hour (old, one park) | Lead falls, rappel errors, rockfall, avalanche | Schussman et al. 1990 via Kovářová 2024; American Alpine Club, Accidents in North American Climbing | OWN BAND on the only rate; the gym is the swap |
| Free solo climbing (named, "free climbing") | No rate and no denominator; the fatal outcome of a fall is near-certain and participation is tiny. A circulating "68 US deaths since 1950" could not be traced to its source. Note: the tract's "free climbing" is read as free solo; roped free climbing is the row above and the gym row below | not computable; by construction the highest per-fall on the page | Fall | American Alpine Club 2025 | OWN BAND |
| Hang gliding · paragliding (named) | UK members 2000–14: 40 (hang) and 47 (para) deaths per 100,000 participant-years; US about 10 deaths a year, no member denominator published | ≈400–470 per participant-year ≈8–10 per flight-hour | Canopy collapse near terrain, mid-air collision, obstacle strike on approach, drowning after water landing | Feletti et al., Aerosp Med Hum Perform 2017; USHPA fatality reports 2013–22 | OWN BAND per year; JUSTIFY OR SWAP per flight |
| Canyoneering | Austria 2005–18: 9 deaths among 471 people in 297 accidents; extrapolated to 0.02 deaths per 1,000 hours, about one in 407 active canyoneers a year (the authors call it "vague"); Zion lost 11 in 2005–15, seven in one flash flood | ≈20 per hour ≈2,500 per participant-year | Drowning in pools and swims, flash flood, stuck on rope, falls | Austrian canyoning study 2020; Zion NP 2016 | OWN BAND per year |
| JUSTIFY OR SWAP — ten or more times the road, per hour | |||||
| Technical and rebreather diving | 241 confirmed rebreather deaths 2013–22 (24 a year, 10–15% of all scuba deaths); 1.8–3.8 deaths per 100,000 dives, roughly ten times open-circuit sport diving | ≈18–38 per dive ≈12–25 per hour | Hypoxia, hyperoxia or CO₂ from loop failure, mostly at 40–80 m | Tillmans et al., Diving Hyperb Med 2024 | JUSTIFY OR SWAP |
| Triathlon | 1.5–1.7 deaths or cardiac arrests per 100,000 participants (135 in 9 million starts 1985–2016); 90 of 135 in the swim; men over 60 ran 18.6 per 100,000; 44% had a heart abnormality at autopsy | ≈15–17 per race ≈10–30 per hour in the swim leg | Sudden cardiac death in cold water at the start, out of rescuers' sightline | Harris et al., JAMA 2010; Ann Intern Med 2017 | JUSTIFY OR SWAP — the swim; screen the heart |
| Motorcycling (TPG 47.4.1: "racing motorcycles") | 6,228 US deaths in 2024 (6,335 in 2023); 28.0 per 100 million vehicle-miles against 1.05 for a car occupant, 27 times the per-mile risk; 67 deaths per 100,000 registered motorcycles a year, about one in 1,500, against 12 per 100,000 cars; supersport bikes ran four times the death rate of other types per registered machine (IIHS); the single largest recreational body count on this page | ≈28 per 100 miles ≈11 per hour at 40 mph · a 200-mile Sunday ride ≈ 56 · ≈670 per registered-bike-year | A car turning left across the rider (46% of two-vehicle fatal crashes); single-vehicle run-off; 35% of the dead unhelmeted, 26% over the alcohol limit, 36% speeding, a third unlicensed | NHTSA Traffic Safety Facts: Motorcycles, 2023 and 2024 data; IIHS 2007 | JUSTIFY OR SWAP |
| ATVs and side-by-sides (UTVs) | 744, 988 and 845 reported deaths in 2019, 2020 and 2021 (the latest complete year; CPSC says the count lags and undercounts); about 100,000 ER visits a year, a fifth of them admitted; no vehicle-in-use denominator is published, so no rate | not computable second-largest body count on the page | Overturn (38% of ATV deaths) and collision (37%); the machine rolled in 63% of injuries and the rider was thrown in 78%; helmets on 29%; children under 16 are 12–15% of the deaths (about 100–125 a year) and 27% of the injuries, mostly on adult-sized machines | CPSC, 2024 Report of Deaths and Injuries Involving Off-Highway Vehicles (May 2025) | JUSTIFY OR SWAP — and never a child on an adult machine |
| Snowmobiling | Canada 73 deaths a year 2013–19; the US has no national series, only states (Minnesota 8 a season, Wisconsin 16, Michigan 15), which sum to something like 100–200 a year; Minnesota 1.4–6.9 fatal accidents per 100,000 registered sleds, Canada about 13 per 100,000 | ≈40–170 per registered-sled-year | A tree or other fixed object at speed (49% of Canadian single-sled deaths), through the ice (14%), ejection (14%), avalanche (10%); speed a factor in 64%, alcohol in a quarter | Statistics Canada 2021; Minnesota DNR; CDC MMWR 2003 | JUSTIFY OR SWAP — speed, ice, drink |
| Amateur motorsport: rally, circuit, drag, street | Insurer data: circuit racing of every category under 0.1 deaths per 1,000 licence-holders a year; international rally 5.7 per 1,000 a year, national rally under 0.4; illegal street racing about 100 US deaths a year in the only FARS analysis (1998–2001), with no count since 2010 and no participant denominator; track days and karting have no published rate at all | circuit <100 per year · national rally <400 · international rally ≈5,700 per year | Wall or roadside object at speed; in street racing, other motorists and bystanders | RGA Reinsurance 2013; Knight, Cook & Olson, Injury Prevention 2004 | JUSTIFY OR SWAP — rally is OWN BAND; a closed circuit is below the street |
| Rodeo and bull riding (TPG 47.4.1: "bull riding") | 21 deaths among 518,286 sanctioned professional rodeo participant-registrations 1989–2009 (4.05 per 100,000; 7.29 in 2007–09); the Professional Bull Riders tour counts three deaths in about 28 years; amateur and youth rodeo is uncounted. Bull riding injures 28–48 riders per 1,000 rides, about ten times football per exposure; catastrophic injuries 9–20 per 100,000 contestants, 83% of them in the roughstock events | ≈40–73 per professional season | Trampled or stepped on after the dismount, crushing the chest (16 of 21 deaths); head injury | Butterwick et al., Clin J Sport Med 2011; systematic review, OJSM 2024 | JUSTIFY OR SWAP — the dismount is the death |
| For comparison, not recreation: horse-racing jockey | 5 deaths in 748,367 Australian race rides 2002–06; about two US jockeys a year killed racing or training among roughly 900 | ≈6.7 per ride ≈2,700–3,400 per season | Fall at speed under the field | Hitchens et al., MJA 2009 | OWN BAND per year — and a job, so not this sin |
| General aviation (named, "personal plane flying") | 0.65 fatal accidents per 100,000 flight hours in 2023 (0.89 in 2013; 186 fatal accidents); most fatal crashes kill everyone aboard, so an occupant's own risk is of the same order | ≈5–7 per hour aboard about 100 times the airline rate | Loss of control in flight; mechanical failure rising (33 fatal accidents in 2023) | AOPA Air Safety Institute, 35th McSpadden Report 2025 | JUSTIFY OR SWAP |
| Skydiving, sport (named) | 16 deaths in about 3.47 million US jumps in 2025 (0.46 per 100,000); 9 in 3.88 million in 2024, the record low; 0.85 per 100,000 pooled over 2000–16; 11 per 100,000 in 1961. Tandem: about one student death per 500,000 jumps (10-year average, USPA) | ≈2–5 per jump (≈8 long-run) · ≈2 tandem ≈50 per hour of jump time | Landing problems (34%, half of them deliberate low turns), equipment (12%), canopy collision (12%), medical (10%), failure to pull (5%) | USPA 2024 and 2025 fatality summaries | JUSTIFY OR SWAP — the wind tunnel exists |
| Hot-air ballooning (named) | 37 US deaths 2000–16 (16 of them in one Texas crash in 2016), about two a year; an industry estimate of 400,000–500,000 passengers a year is the only denominator and is unverified | ≈3–5 per passenger flight ≈3–5 per hour (thin) | Power-line and fixed-object collision (all five commercial-tour deaths 2000–11), hard landings (81% of crashes) | Ballard et al. 2013; NTSB via press | JUSTIFY OR SWAP — on thin data |
| Scuba, recreational | 0.18 per 100,000 dives (US survey basis, 563 deaths in 306 million dives 2006–15) to 0.5–1.0 (British club divers); 16 per 100,000 diver-years among association members; about 180–220 deaths a year reported worldwide | ≈2–10 per dive ≈2–10 per hour · ≈164 per member-year | Drowning after a gas-supply or entrapment problem (70%), arterial gas embolism (14%), cardiac (13%) | Buzzacott et al., Public Health 2018; DAN; Denoble 2008 | JUSTIFY OR SWAP at the top of the range; LOOK IT UP at the bottom |
| LOOK IT UP — near the road per hour, with a specific mechanism | |||||
| Whitewater kayaking and private rafting | 0.87 deaths per 100,000 user-days on 30 managed rivers (1994–98, the only per-day rate); 2.9 per 100,000 kayakers a year; 30–40 US moving-water deaths a year (43 in 2024, 77 at the 2011 peak); over half of recent kayak deaths are recreational boats on flat water with no life jacket | ≈9 per user-day ≈2 per hour · ≈29 per kayaker-year | Flush drowning, strainers, low-head dams, foot entrapment, cold water, cardiac in older boaters | American Whitewater accident database and 2024–25 summaries | LOOK IT UP — the life jacket and the dam |
| Commercial whitewater rafting | 6–10 US deaths a year on about 2.5 million guided user-days, 0.24–0.4 per 100,000; New Zealand 0.16–0.27 per 100,000 participants | ≈2–4 per trip ≈1 per hour | Ejection and drowning; a notable share cardiac | America Outdoors; NZ data | LOOK IT UP |
| Backcountry skiing and ski touring | Switzerland: 0.87 deaths per 100,000 ski-touring days, 4.4 per 100,000 active tourers a year (about Swiss traffic-death risk), men three times women; US avalanche deaths average 23 a year over ten seasons, 39% backcountry tourers, 29% snowmobilers | ≈9 per touring day ≈1.5 per hour · ≈44 per tourer-year | Burial: asphyxia, trauma | Winkler, Fischer & Techel, ISSW 2016; Colorado Avalanche Information Center | LOOK IT UP — the forecast; the resort is the swap |
| Highlining | 12 highline deaths worldwide 2011–26 among an estimated 10,000 highliners; 8 of the 12 were not clipped to the leash | ≈60 per highliner-year | Unclipped leash; anchor failure | International Slackline Association risk assessments | LOOK IT UP — the leash is two-thirds of it |
| Canoe, kayak, paddleboard (flat water) | 143 US deaths in 2024 (canoe 25, kayak 89, paddleboard 29, up from 11), 26% of all boating deaths; 87% of drowned boaters wore no life jacket; paddlecraft are unregistered so no rate exists | not computable; the deaths are concentrated in one omission | Capsize or fall-in, drowning without a life jacket, cold water | US Coast Guard, Recreational Boating Statistics 2024 | LOOK IT UP — wear it |
| Snorkeling | Hawaii: about 21 snorkel deaths a year, 92% visitors, 43% of all non-resident ocean drownings 2019–23; Australia 13.5 a year; no exposure denominator | not computable | Drowning (58%) and cardiac (27%, mean age 58); rebreathing in full-face masks suspected | Hawaii Department of Health 2024; Lippmann 2019 | LOOK IT UP — age and heart |
| Freediving and spearfishing | About 60 breath-hold deaths a year reported to Divers Alert Network 2010–13, mostly US and rising; reported breath-hold deaths run about a third of scuba's on a far smaller, unmeasured exposure base, so the per-dive risk is probably higher than scuba and nobody can say by how much | not computable; likely above scuba | Shallow-water blackout after hyperventilation, diving alone, no spotter | DAN Annual Diving Report 2012–15 | LOOK IT UP — never alone |
| Hunting | Reported fatalities fell from 91 (2000) to 19 (2007) across the US and Canada, partly a reporting change; state incident rates 1.5–3 per 100,000 hunters a year; a repeated "300–500 tree-stand deaths a year" has no primary source, while states that count find one or two each; 3,001 ER-treated tree-stand falls in 2018 | ≈1–6 per hunter-year | Tree-stand falls (mean 18 ft, half with spinal fractures), shot by another hunter (69% of Pennsylvania's 2025 shootings), self-inflicted | IHEA; Pennsylvania and New York hunting-incident reports; Tree Stand Safety Awareness Foundation | LOOK IT UP — the harness |
| Marathon and half marathon | Cardiac arrest 1.01 per 100,000 marathon runners (0.27 half); deaths 0.20–0.39 per 100,000 across all road races, about four a year in the US; two-thirds now survive | ≈2–7 per race ≈1–2 per hour | Coronary disease in older runners, hypertrophic cardiomyopathy in younger | Kim et al., NEJM 2012; RACER 2, JAMA 2025 | LOOK IT UP — the heart, over 40 |
| Bungee jumping (named) | No data exist. The repeated "one in 500,000" traces, per Smithsonian Air & Space, to a high-school student's project; aggregator figures contradict each other and are not cited here. Injuries on record: retinal haemorrhage, whiplash including one quadriplegia, carotid dissection | unknown (≈2 per jump if the folk figure were right) | Cord miscalculated or detached; harness failure | Smithsonian Air & Space; case literature | LOOK IT UP — and it cannot be; treat as unmeasured |
| Ziplines | More than a dozen US deaths reported 2006–16, at least six in 2015; no registry and no ride count; 16,850 ER visits 1997–2012 with the rate up 56% in the last three years of the study, 12% admitted | not computable | Falls (77% of injuries), striking the anchor tree; deaths are mostly falls from failed harness or brake | Nationwide Children's (NEISS) 2015; Outside 2016 | LOOK IT UP — who inspected it |
| Horseback riding | About 0.5 micromorts a ride on the standard British estimate; no verified current US death count exists (205 deaths in 27 states 1976–87 is the last primary series; secondary sources say anything from 20 to 100 a year). The injuries are the story: 65,000–103,000 ER visits a year, 11–12% admitted, twice the rate for injuries generally, head and neck 23%, brain injury 11%; over 60% of deaths are head injuries; 9% of one trauma-centre series were wearing a helmet. The famous "one serious injury per 350 riding hours versus one per 7,000 on a motorcycle" is a 1985 textbook estimate with no exposure data behind it (see counterweights) | ≈0.5 per ride ≈0.25–0.5 per hour | Thrown or fallen onto the head; kicked or trampled when dismounted | Spiegelhalter & Blastland 2013; CDC MMWR 1990; Thomas et al., BJSM 2006; Smith et al., AJEM 2019 | LOOK IT UP — the helmet, every ride |
| Recreational boating (all vessels) | 556 US deaths in 2024, the lowest on record; 4.8 per 100,000 registered vessels (20.6 in 1971); 76% drowned and 87% of the drowned wore no life jacket; alcohol the leading known factor (20%); 69% of the dead were on a boat whose operator had never taken a safety course; four in five drownings from boats under 21 feet | ≈48 per registered-vessel-year | Fall overboard, capsize or swamping, then drowning without a jacket | US Coast Guard, Recreational Boating Statistics 2024 | LOOK IT UP — one item of clothing |
| Jet skis (personal watercraft) | 38 deaths in 2024, 7% of boating deaths, but 563 injuries, 26% of all boating injuries: one death per 15 injuries against one per four for other boats; only a quarter of the deaths are drownings | not computable; injury-heavy | Collision with another vessel or a fixed object; blunt trauma | USCG 2024, Tables 24–27 | LOOK IT UP — the other jet ski |
| Bicycling | 1,103 cyclists killed by motor vehicles in 2024; about 9.7 deaths per 100 million miles, 8.6 times a car occupant per mile but, at bicycle speeds, about three times per hour; mean age of the dead 48, 87% male, 81% urban, alcohol in a third of fatal crashes. Mountain biking: downhill 17 injuries per 1,000 hours, enduro racing 38, cross-country 8; no death series | ≈0.1 per mile ≈1 per hour at 10 mph | Struck by a motor vehicle, light trucks over-represented; head injury | NHTSA, Bicyclists and Other Cyclists: 2024 Data; Buehler & Pucher 2021 | LOOK IT UP — the road, not the bike; a path or trail is baseline |
| E-scooters, e-bikes, hoverboards | 135 deaths in 2024 (e-bikes 97, e-scooters 38), 533 since 2017, with the recent years still incomplete; 149,100 ER visits in 2024 against 37,300 in 2017; shared scooters in one city produced 20 ER-level injuries per 100,000 trips, half of them serious, under 1% helmeted | ≈200 injuries per million trips (no per-trip death rate) | Motor-vehicle collision (68% of e-scooter and 55% of e-bike deaths); loss of control; lithium-battery fires at home (11 of 17 hoverboard deaths) | CPSC, Micromobility Products-Related Deaths, Injuries and Hazard Patterns 2017–2024 (Apr 2026) | LOOK IT UP — rising faster than anything else on the page |
| Skateboarding, downhill longboarding | About 30 deaths a year, nearly all motor-vehicle collisions in the street; 21–23 deaths per 100 million miles in the one state-year that measured it, twice a bicycle and nineteen times a car per mile; about 65,000 ER visits a year for ages 5–19 | ≈0.2 per mile ≈1.7 per hour | Cars; head injury at speed downhill | Fang & Handy 2017; McKenzie et al. 2016 | LOOK IT UP — the street, not the park |
| Dirt bikes and motocross | No national death series exists (off-road two-wheelers fall between the CPSC's and NHTSA's counts); about 23,800 ER visits a year among under-19s in 2001–04, 7.5% admitted; elite competition runs 22 injuries per 1,000 riding hours | not computable | Falls and jumps onto the head, spine and chest; collisions | CDC MMWR 2006; Tomida et al., BJSM 2005 | LOOK IT UP — and it cannot be; treat as unmeasured, next to the ATV |
| BASELINE — at or below the cost of leaving the house | |||||
| Resort skiing and snowboarding | 50 deaths on 61.6 million US skier visits in 2024–25 (0.8 per million; the ten-year average is 44 a year; 35 and 0.58 per million in 2023–24); catastrophic injuries about one per million visits | ≈0.6–0.8 per day ≈0.1–0.2 per hour | Collision with a tree at speed, usually a young male on an intermediate groomed run | National Ski Areas Association 2024–25 figures via Colorado Sun and Snowbrains | BASELINE — the helmet and the speed |
| Sailing | 1.19 deaths per million sailing person-days (271 deaths 2000–11); 10 US sailboat deaths in 2024; 82% of the drowned wore no life jacket | ≈1.2 per day ≈0.2–0.3 per hour | Fall overboard; weather | Nathanson et al., Wilderness Environ Med 2016; USCG 2024 | BASELINE |
| Surfing | Australia 2004–20: 0.63 deaths per 100,000 surfers a year, 0.06 per million hours; no US count; 1.8 significant injuries per 1,000 recreational hours | ≈6 per surfer-year ≈0.06 per hour | Drowning (58%), cardiac in men over 45 (33%), head and spine on reef (13%) | Lawes et al., PLOS One 2023; Nathanson 2007 | BASELINE |
| Swimming | 4,509 US unintentional drownings in 2022 across every setting including bathtubs; the rate is highest at ages 1–4 (3.1 per 100,000) and for those under 30 natural water is 48% and pools 24%; per hour in the water roughly 0.1–1 (thin) | ≈0.1–1 per hour | Toddlers in pools; teenagers and adults in open water, with alcohol, without a life jacket | CDC MMWR, May 2024; Moreland et al. 2022 | BASELINE — except the toddler and the pool (Exhibit C) |
| Rock fishing (Australia) · fishing from a boat (US) | Rock fishing 13 deaths a year, about 1.2 per 100,000 participants, 83% without a lifejacket, washed off in 85%; US boat fishing 178 deaths in 2024, a third of all boating deaths | ≈12 per participant-year ≈0.14 per hour | Washed off rocks; fall overboard | Surf Life Saving Australia 2020; USCG 2024 | BASELINE — with the jacket |
| Hiking in national parks | About 358 deaths a year in US parks 2014–19, of which hiking accounts for about 42, falls 206 and drowning 314; 0.6–1 deaths per million visits all causes; Grand Canyon about 12 a year, half medical; lightning kills about 20–30 Americans a year, two-thirds at leisure (fishing first) | ≈0.6–1 per visit, all causes | Falls, heat, drowning, cardiac | National Park Service mortality data; National Weather Service 2006–19 | BASELINE |
| Indoor and sport climbing, bouldering | Gym: zero deaths in 515,337 visits, 0.02 injuries per 1,000 hours; sport climbing 0.2 injuries per 1,000 hours; bouldering 1.5–4 per 1,000 hours, nearly all minor | ≈0 | Belay and clipping errors are the gym's only serious mechanism | Schöffl et al. 2013; Neuhof et al. 2011 | BASELINE — the swap for the three rows above it |
| Golf, tennis, bowling, yoga, pickleball, running on a track, video games | Deaths are the heart, lightning (golf 0.7 a year) and falls at advanced age; see Exhibit D and the pickleball row in Exhibit B | ≈0 | — | — | BASELINE |
What the ladder shows. The tract's named cases are confirmed at the top (BASE, free solo, hang gliding and paragliding by the year) and demoted in the middle (a skydive is two to five micromorts, a few hours of driving, and a tandem jump about two). The cases the tract did not name fill the top half of the ladder: every big mountain, cave diving, canyoneering, alpine climbing on the one rate that exists, rebreather diving, and above all the motorcycle, which on the crude count kills more Americans a year than everything else on this page combined several times over. Bungee jumping, named in the tract, turns out to be the one activity about which the lookup returns nothing, and the honest grade for "nobody has counted" is not "safe." And the bottom third of the ladder, where most people's actual recreation lives, is cheaper than the drive to it, which is where the tract's "cluster your risk" advice about the car becomes the operative one.
Tract 13's clause is "death or serious injury," and the second half is a different list from the first. Nothing here would make a micromort table; most of it kills a handful of Americans a year or none. What it does instead is break the neck. The common thread is the head arriving before the body: a dive into four feet of water, a failed somersault on a trampoline, a basket toss onto a gym floor, a tackle led with the crown, a judo throw onto a child's skull. The unit in this table is therefore not the micromort but the catastrophic-injury count, with emergency-room totals shown for scale and flagged for what they are (a hundred thousand trampoline visits a year is a lot of sprained ankles and a few hundred spinal cords). The surveillance sources are the Consumer Product Safety Commission's hospital sample, the national spinal cord injury database at Birmingham, and the Chapel Hill catastrophic sport registry already used in Exhibit D.
| Activity | Deaths | Life-changing injury | Scale (ED visits, injury rates) | The mechanism, and what the data says prevents it | Reading |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Diving head-first into shallow water (lakes, pools, backyard boards) | No national death count; drowning after the neck injury is the fatal path | The leading sport-and-recreation cause of spinal cord injury. Diving is about 4.7% of all traumatic spinal cord injuries historically and 3.65% of new cases 2010–22 (NSCISC; roughly 330 of 9,200 enrolled); 96% cervical; about 80% into water under five feet. In one pool series 57% of the injured dove into less than four feet of water, 86% were male, 94% had no lifeguard; peak age 15–19. | About 6,500 ED visits a year for under-19s (1990–2006). An orthopaedic-society figure of "about 800 paralysed a year" circulates without a traceable year. | Head strikes bottom at C4–C6. Competitive diving on a regulation board is not the problem (Exhibit D). The whole risk is depth: feet first into anything you have not measured. This is the cheapest life-changing injury on the page to avoid. | LOOK IT UP — the depth, every time |
| Backyard trampoline | CPSC counted 22 deaths in 2000–09, about two a year; no later national tally was found | About 0.5% of trampoline injuries leave permanent neurological damage (AAP 2012), which on the ED volume is several hundred a year; head and neck are 10–17% of injuries; cervical injuries come from failed somersaults and from landing on the frame or the ground. About 5,500 hospitalised or dead on arrival in 2018. | 97,900–116,200 ED visits a year (CPSC 2004–09, 2018); 32–38 per 100,000 population; paediatric incidence rose from 35.5 to 53 per 100,000 person-years 2008–17 and trampolines now account for about 6% of all paediatric ED fractures. | Three-quarters of injuries happen with more than one jumper on the mat; the smallest jumper is up to fourteen times more likely to be the one hurt; 27–39% are falls off. Nets and pads do not reduce the injury rate (the AAP found "no inverse correlation" and warned they give "a false sense of security"). The paediatricians' position is that home trampolines are "strongly discouraged"; the one evidence-backed mitigation is one jumper at a time, no somersaults, an adult watching. | LOOK IT UP — the second jumper is the risk |
| Trampoline parks | At least seven deaths at US parks 2012–19 (news tally; arbitration clauses suppress reporting) | Park injuries are more often dislocations and lower-extremity fractures than home injuries (odds ratio 2.4), include open fractures and spinal cord injuries, and are admitted at 9% versus 5% for home trampolines (Kasmire 2016). | Park ED visits went from 581 (2010) to 6,932 (2014) as parks went from 40 to 280; there were over 800 parks by 2019. | Landing between mats, hitting wall pads, collisions, flips into foam pits. Commercial, supervised, padded, and worse per visit than the backyard. | LOOK IT UP |
| Cheerleading (stunts and tosses) | One direct and nine indirect high-school deaths 1982–2025 | 65% of all catastrophic injuries to high-school girls 1982–2009, 71% in college; the flier takes 70% (Exhibit D). | Direct catastrophic 2.0 per 100,000 seasons on the official denominator, about 0.7 on the real one. | Fall from a pyramid or basket toss onto a hard floor. The 2006–07 rule against tosses onto hard surfaces cut catastrophic injuries roughly fourfold. The risk is the stunt, not the sport; sideline cheer without pyramids is at the floor of Exhibit D. | LOOK IT UP — no stunts on hard floors |
| Tackle football | 2.7 direct deaths a year across all levels 2016–25, plus heat and cardiac deaths (Exhibit D) | Thirty-nine non-fatal catastrophic injuries in 2025 alone (twenty cervical, six brain); school-level cervical-cord injuries with incomplete recovery 0.27–0.73 per 100,000 a year. Chronic: CTE in 177 of 202 donated brains and 110 of 111 NFL brains (Mez 2017), but from a brain bank that families of symptomatic players chose to donate to, with no control group, so not a prevalence; the Mayo bank found CTE in 21 of 66 contact-sport athletes and 0 of 198 controls. | Concussions about 1 per 1,000 athlete-exposures at school level, 3.9 in games; college games 3.7. | Head-down contact for the acute injuries; repeated sub-concussive impact for the chronic disease, which is the other bucket's sin (Ground rules) and is printed here because the same decision produces both. Flag football has no catastrophic record worth printing. | JUSTIFY OR SWAP — flag exists |
| Gymnastics, ice hockey, pole vault | See Exhibit D | The three highest direct catastrophic rates in school and college sport after football, all by the same route: the head below the body at speed. | Men's gymnastics 3.2 (HS) and 13.7 (college) per 100,000 seasons; men's hockey 2.6 and 8.2; pole vault historically about one death a year among 25,000 vaulters. | Apparatus falls; checking from behind; missing the pit. Rule changes (pit size, checking bans) measurably moved each one. | JUSTIFY OR SWAP |
| Boxing | About ten a year worldwide for a century (Velazquez collection, 2,076 deaths since 1720); 84 brain-injury deaths in 428,904 professional bouts 2000–19, about one death per 5,100 bouts, which is about 100 micromorts per fighter per bout | Acute subdural haematoma after a knockout is the fatal injury; 64% of professional deaths followed a knockout. The chronic brain disease is the other bucket's. | Injuries 108–228 per 1,000 athlete-exposures; about 15,000 ED visits a year (2018). | Blows to the head are the sport. Bag and pad work carry none of this; sparring carries most of it. The old medical-association figure of 0.13 deaths per 1,000 participants a year puts a career at roughly the risk of a few years of motorcycling. | JUSTIFY OR SWAP — the bag, not the ring |
| Mixed martial arts, kickboxing, Muay Thai | Twenty deaths in sanctioned MMA bouts since 2007, nine in unregulated ones; no bout denominator exists | Head trauma; MMA injury rate 229 per 1,000 athlete-exposures in the pooled studies (range 110–474), the highest of any sport with a measured rate; kickboxing 110–390. | About 24 injuries per 100 professional fight participations. | Same as boxing with more ways to be hit. Grappling-only arts are the swap: Brazilian jiu-jitsu runs 9–32 injuries per 1,000 exposures, nearly all joints, no deaths in the tournament series. | JUSTIFY OR SWAP — grapple |
| Judo for children | At least 114 schoolchildren killed in Japanese school judo 1983–2010, about four a year, almost all acute subdural haematoma (Nagoya University tally; 121 by 2016) | The child's head reaching the mat first in a throw; competition injury 47 per 1,000 exposures, the highest of the Olympic combat sports per minute. | No US series. | The tally was compiled when Japan made martial arts compulsory in middle schools in 2012 and covers the three decades before it; the response was restricting throws for beginners and mandating breakfall training. A Western club is not a Japanese school gym, and the Japanese count is the only one that exists. | LOOK IT UP — who is teaching the fall |
| Kitesurfing | About ten a year worldwide in a private tally, acknowledged undercount; no rate | Being lofted or dragged into a hard object; fractures in 4% of injuries, 3% admitted. | 4.8 injuries per 1,000 hours by survey (beginners 65, professionals 1.1), 7–10.5 by ED and prospective studies. | The wind does the damage on land, in gusts, at launch and landing; the water part is comparatively safe. Windsurfing, which cannot loft you, runs 0.2–5 per 1,000 hours with no fatality series. | LOOK IT UP — the launch, not the ride |
| Tombstoning (jumping from cliffs, bridges, piers) | UK: at least 20 deaths and 70 life-changing injuries in about twenty years (RoSPA; 12 deaths in 139 incidents 2004–08); no denominator anywhere | Cervical injury on rocks or a shallow bottom, cold shock on entry; the injury-to-death ratio is about 3:1 and the injuries are spinal. | — | Simone's "jumping off high things, like bridges into water or cliffs into water" (TP 35.0.5). Unmeasured depth and unseen rocks are the entire mechanism; the same jump into a known-deep pool from a platform is competitive diving, which is at the floor of Exhibit D. | JUSTIFY OR SWAP — a measured pool exists |
| Pickleball (over 60) | None found | Falls onto the wrist and hip: fractures are 27–29% of injuries, mean age mid-sixties, 69% of fractures in women; eye injuries rising. | ED visits 8,900 (2020) to 17,000 (2022). | The low end of the injury class, printed because "serious injury" means something different at seventy: a hip fracture at that age carries a one-year mortality of around a fifth, which is a death the sport never gets charged for. | BASELINE — with eyes open about the hip |
What the table shows. The tract's phrase "life-changing injury" has a specific anatomy, and it is the cervical spine. Every row above that carries a real catastrophic record puts the head below the body at speed; every mitigation that measurably worked (pit sizes, basket-toss bans, checking rules, one jumper at a time, feet first) interrupts exactly that. The practical form of the lookup for this class is a single question: does this activity, done the way it will actually be done, send the head down first? If yes, the ER totals are beside the point and the spinal-cord registry is the number to read.
The tract's examples are all things you have to travel to. The activities that actually fill the emergency rooms are the ones at home, bought for the children, and never thought of as thrill-seeking. This table is the Consumer Product Safety Commission's hospital-sample numbers for the equipment of ordinary recreation, with the death counts where any exist. The denominators are poor almost everywhere (nobody counts trampoline-hours), so most rows carry national totals and a participation estimate rather than a rate, and the "Reading" column leans on the mechanism. The point of the table is the one the tract makes about the car: the thing in your own driveway is the thing to look up.
| Equipment | Deaths | Injuries | Who, and how | What the data says to do | Reading |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Backyard swimming pool | About 358 children under 15 drown in pools and spas each year (2019–21), 70–74% of them in residential pools; roughly 250 a year in home pools. Divided by the US stock of residential pools (6 million in Levitt's 2001 arithmetic, 8–11 million by industry counts) that is one child death per 11,000 pools a year (Levitt) to one per 32,000–43,000 (recomputed) | About 6,500 ER-treated child submersions a year; 73–77% under five | An unsupervised toddler; 59% of drownings at ages 1–4 are in pools, 49% at the child's own home. The Levitt comparison stands in direction if not in magnitude: a pool in the yard is far more likely to kill a child than a gun in the house | Four-sided isolation fencing with a self-latching gate is the one intervention with strong evidence; alarms and covers are weaker. The owner's exposure is 25–90 micromorts per pool-year borne by the smallest person in the house | JUSTIFY OR SWAP — if there is a toddler |
| Hot tub / spa | About 14 children a year (2019–21), nearly all under five; older CPSC counts had over 700 deaths of all ages 1980–96, about 44 a year; entrapment and hair entanglement killed 9 in 1999–2007 and 13 in 1978–96 | 4% of child ED submersions | Adults: drowning with alcohol, heart disease, seizure disorders (45% of one 158-death series involved cocaine or alcohol); children: submersion; suction entrapment | Drain covers, no alcohol, no solitary soaking with a cardiac history | LOOK IT UP |
| Trampoline | About 2 a year (CPSC 2000–09) | 98,000–116,000 ER visits a year; about 5,500 hospitalised (2018); several hundred permanent neurological injuries a year | See Exhibit B: the second jumper, the smallest child, the somersault | One at a time, no flips, an adult present; nets do not help (AAP). The paediatric position is not to own one | LOOK IT UP |
| Bouncy castle / inflatable | At least 28 worldwide 2000–21, all wind events (six children at Devonport, Tasmania, 2021) | About 11,300 child ER visits a year by 2010, a fifteen-fold rise since 1995; 42,000 ER visits for all amusement inflatables in 2018 | Falls and collisions with multiple children aboard; lofting on apparently calm days (cold fronts, dust devils) | Anchor every point; take it down in any wind; one age group at a time | LOOK IT UP — the stakes |
| Playground and swing set | 5–15 a year depending on the count; 68% are hangings on drawstrings, ropes and cords | 218,500 ER visits in 2018; 11,900 hospitalised; falls are the leading cause, fractures 36% | Falls to a hard surface; strangulation on a cord caught in equipment | Surfacing depth; no drawstrings; no ropes tied to equipment | BASELINE — minus the cord |
| Backyard zip line · treehouse | Zipline deaths exist (see Exhibit A); treehouse none recorded | Ziplines 16,850 ER visits 1997–2012, 30% on backyard and farm rigs, 11% admitted; treehouses about 2,800 a year, 79% falls, a fall over ten feet triples the odds of admission | Falls; a backyard zipline has no inspector | Height and landing surface | LOOK IT UP |
| Diving board, or any dive into the home pool | No count; the fatal path is drowning after the neck injury | Diving is about 4–5% of all traumatic spinal cord injuries; 80% into water under five feet | Head-first into the shallow end, or off the board into a pool too short for it; 15–19-year-old males | Feet first unless the depth is known; most residential pools are too short for a board | JUSTIFY OR SWAP — remove the board |
| Riding lawn mower (children) | About 75 a year on older CPSC figures, one in five a young child; no current tally | About 9,400 child ER visits a year; amputations are 32% of child mower injuries and 97% of those are feet, toes, hands and fingers; the third leading cause of paediatric traumatic amputation; more than 800 children a year run over or backed over | A child riding along, or run over by a reversing mower | No passengers, children indoors while it runs, never mow in reverse toward where they might be | JUSTIFY OR SWAP — the "ride-along" is the sin |
| Fireworks | At least 15 US deaths in 2025 | About 13,000 ER visits in 2025; sparklers 1,300; burns 38%, hands and fingers 35%, head, face and eyes 22% | Mortars, illegal devices, relighting duds; children with sparklers | Distance; one lighter; no sparklers under five | LOOK IT UP |
| Chainsaw · table saw (hobby woodcutting and woodworking) | Negligible as recreation | Chainsaws about 25,600 ER visits a year (2018–22); table saws about 30,000 blade-contact injuries and 4,700 amputations a year | Kickback; hands into the blade | Riving knife and guard on the saw; chaps and training on the chainsaw; the proposed federal table-saw rule was withdrawn in 2025 | LOOK IT UP — the amputation, not the death |
| Golf cart | Rollovers and ejections; no national series | More than 15,000 ER visits a year, rising, increasingly children at the wheel | Children driving; standing passengers; turns on slopes | No standing, no child drivers | BASELINE — with a seated adult |
| Tree stand (hunting) | One or two a year per state that counts; the "300–500 a year" figure has no source | 3,001 ER-treated falls in 2018; mean fall 18 feet; half with spinal fractures; about 10% of stand users injured in a year | Climbing in or out without a harness; old straps | A full-body harness clipped before the feet leave the ground | LOOK IT UP — the harness |
| The small boat (Malcolm's own swap for Disneyland, TP 35.0.5) | 556 US recreational boating deaths in 2024; 87% of the drowned (310 of 357 with known status) wore no life jacket; open motorboats are the leading vessel type and alcohol the leading contributing factor | Towed sports (tubing, skiing, wakeboarding) 19 deaths and 242 injuries in 2024 | Fall overboard or capsize, no life jacket, cold water, a propeller | The tract's own substitute is recreational boating, and the recreational-boating death toll is almost entirely one omitted item of clothing. With jackets on the children and the adult it is a baseline activity; without, it is Exhibit A | LOOK IT UP — jackets on everyone |
| ATV or side-by-side | About 100–125 children under 16 a year, 12–15% of all off-highway-vehicle deaths | About 27,200 child ER visits a year (27% of the total); head and neck 34% | A child on an adult-sized machine; rollover and ejection; helmets on fewer than a third | Age-appropriate machine, helmet, no passengers, no pavement; the manufacturers' own age labels are the rule most often broken | JUSTIFY OR SWAP — for a child, the sin is the parent's |
| Dirt bike | Uncounted nationally | About 23,800 ER visits a year for riders under 19 | Jumps and falls; head, spine, chest | Helmet and armour; no national data means no reassurance | LOOK IT UP — unmeasured |
| E-scooter, e-bike, hoverboard | 135 in 2024 and rising; hoverboard deaths are mostly battery fires in the house | 149,100 ER visits in 2024, four times 2017; children and teenagers over-represented on scooters and hoverboards | Hit by a car at a junction; a battery charging indoors overnight | Helmet (18% of injured scooter riders wore one), off the road, battery charged away from exits and bedrooms | LOOK IT UP |
| Horse | No current US count; over 60% of deaths are head injuries | 65,000–103,000 ER visits a year; admission rate twice the all-injury average; brain injury in about one injury in nine | Thrown, usually from a horse the rider knows well (mean 27 years' experience in one trauma series, 9% helmeted) | A certified helmet on every ride, mounted or handling; it is the one piece of equipment on this page with strong evidence behind it | LOOK IT UP — the helmet |
| Go-kart (home or rental) | About 19 a year in the last CPSC series (1985–96), 67% under fifteen, almost all home karts | 10,500–19,500 ER visits a year in that series; head and face 21% of child injuries; hair and clothing caught in exposed axles and chains scalped or strangled | Collision or tip-over; entanglement | Guarded drive train, hair tied, no homemade karts; the rental track has an inspector and the yard does not | LOOK IT UP — the axle guard |
| Bicycle (children) | 102 cyclists under 20 killed in 2020, a quarter of them off the public road and so outside the traffic count | About 137,000 child ER visits a year | Cars at junctions; falls | Helmet; off the road until old enough to read traffic | BASELINE — off the road |
What the table shows. The household's exposure to this sin is mostly bought at a store and parked in the yard, and almost all of it is borne by children. The pool is the only item on the page that kills more of its owners' children than any reputed thrill sport kills its participants, and it kills the ones who were never meant to use it. The pattern of the mitigations is also worth noticing: the thing that works is never a product sold alongside the hazard (nets, alarms, pads) but a rule about who is on it and who is watching, which is what the tract means by intentionality.
This is the tract's own worked example ("suppose you're in school and you're choosing your sport"), done with the register the tract should have used. The National Center for Catastrophic Sport Injury Research at Chapel Hill has counted every fatal, permanently disabling and "serious" (full-recovery-after-a-catastrophic-event) injury in American high-school and college sport since 1982. Its rates are per 100,000 participant-seasons, cumulative 1982/83 to 2024/25 unless a year is named. Direct means the injury came from playing (a tackle, a fall from a pyramid, a puck); indirect means exertion revealed something already there (a heart defect, heat stroke, sickle-cell crisis). The centre warns that any rate built on fewer than five events is unstable, and the rows say where that applies. Two findings should reorganise the tract's instinct. First, the sport with the highest direct catastrophic rate at both levels is men's gymnastics, followed by men's ice hockey, football, cheerleading and women's gymnastics; crew does not appear, because in forty-three years it has produced no direct catastrophic event in the high-school tables at all. Second, in most sports the indirect deaths outnumber the direct ones, which means the single most useful thing a parent can look up before a season is not the injury rate but whether the child's heart has been screened.
| Sport (high school unless noted) | Direct catastrophic fatal + disabling + serious, per 100k seasons | Indirect fatal cardiac, heat, etc., per 100k | What actually happens | Reading |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pole vault (1982–98) | ≈4 deaths per 100k per year 16 deaths in 32 catastrophic events among ~25,000 vaulters | — | Missing the pit, striking the box or the standards, head first. Historically the deadliest school sport per participant, about one death a year nationally. Pit-size rules after 2003 cut it to about two catastrophic events a year (nineteen in 2003–11, one fatal); a 2025 study found eight landing injuries in 6,751 attempts. | JUSTIFY OR SWAP — historic; now LOOK IT UP |
| Gymnastics, male | 3.2 fatal 0.80 (n=1) · disabling 1.59 · serious 0.80; college male 13.7 | — | Falls from apparatus onto the neck. The centre names men's gymnastics the highest direct catastrophic rate at both levels. The numerators are tiny (one high-school death in forty-three years), so the rate is unstable; the college figure is the one to weigh. | JUSTIFY OR SWAP — college; LOOK IT UP — HS |
| Ice hockey, male | 2.6 fatal 0.38 (n=5) · disabling 1.06 · serious 1.14; college male 8.2 | 0.46 college 0.59 | Checked from behind into the boards, head first; cervical spine. Canada's registry logged 355 spinal injuries 1943–2011 and watched the rate halve after checking-from-behind rules. Second-highest direct catastrophic rate in college sport. | JUSTIFY OR SWAP |
| Football | 2.5 fatal 0.35 · 1,082 events 1982–2025; college 9.4 | 0.66 college 2.96; heat stroke ≈1.4 deaths/yr 2016–25 | Head-down tackling; cervical cord. In 2025: zero direct deaths, five indirect high-school deaths, thirty-nine non-fatal catastrophic injuries (twenty cervical, six brain). Cervical-cord injuries with incomplete recovery run 0.27–0.73 per 100k a year at the school level. Concussions about 1 per 1,000 athlete-exposures overall and 3.9 in games. The chronic brain disease is the other bucket's business and is printed in Exhibit B with its selection caveat. | JUSTIFY OR SWAP — flag football exists |
| Cheerleading, female | 2.0 fatal 0.03 (n=1) · 70 events; denominator understated ~3× so the true rate is nearer 0.7 | 0.26 (n=9) | Falls from pyramids and basket tosses onto a gym floor; head and neck; the flier takes 70% of the catastrophic injuries. Cheerleading was 65% of all catastrophic injuries to high-school girls 1982–2009 and 71% in college, which is why the Pragmatist's Guide's list (TPG 47.4.1) is right to name it. The 2006–07 rule banning basket tosses onto hard surfaces cut the rate about fourfold: forty-two catastrophic injuries in 2003–14, six in 2014–23. | LOOK IT UP — stunts and tosses are the whole risk |
| Gymnastics, female | 1.4 disabling 0.74 · serious 0.64 · no HS deaths; college 4.6 + one death | — | Same mechanism as the men's; lower rate, still in the top six. | LOOK IT UP |
| Lacrosse, male | 1.1 fatal 0.11 · disabling 0.30 · serious 0.71; college 2.7, fatal 1.08 (n=4) | 0.37 college 0.54 | Ball or stick to the chest (commotio cordis, 3.6% of all 2024/25 catastrophic events across sports) and collisions. A 2024/25 cluster of nine rhabdomyolysis cases came from one college conditioning session. | LOOK IT UP |
| Wrestling, male | 0.74 fatal 0.03 (n=3) · disabling 0.42 · serious 0.29 | 0.29 college 2.32 (n=7) | Cervical spine in throws; the indirect deaths are weight-cutting, which the centre flags by name. | LOOK IT UP — the cutting, not the mat |
| Baseball / softball | 0.39 fatal 0.09 (n=18) · disabling 0.11 · serious 0.19 | 0.11 | Ball to the chest or head; the national registry's commotio cordis cases were 74% baseball, softball and hockey. CPSC counted 88 child deaths 1973–95 (three to four a year), 77% from the ball. Survival after commotio cordis has gone from 16% to over 50% because of defibrillators at the field. | BASELINE — with an AED on site |
| Track and field, male | 0.25 fatal 0.10 (n=24) | — | Almost entirely the throws: twenty-five school deaths from discus, shot and javelin in 1982–2011, several of them officials or bystanders struck by a hammer. The risk is in the throwing circle, not the track. | BASELINE — except the throwing area |
| Soccer | 0.15 male / 0.02 female fatal 0.05 male | 0.23 male / 0.09 female college male 1.1 | Sudden cardiac arrest and goalpost tip-overs. The heading question is chronic and contested: Scottish ex-professionals show a dementia hazard ratio of about 3 (Russell 2024) but the authors call the link to heading unproven, and nothing of the kind is shown for youth play. | BASELINE — anchor the goals |
| Swimming and diving | 0.13 male / 0.09 female fatal 0.02 male | — | Competitive diving is safe; the spinal injuries are recreational and are in Exhibit B. | BASELINE |
| Basketball | ≈0.02 no direct deaths of note | 0.68 male HS college male 6.45 (n=44), the highest of any college sport | The sport cannot hurt you and the exertion can: NCAA Division I men's basketball ran one sudden cardiac death per 5,200 athlete-years in 2003–13 (Harmon 2015), about 190 micromorts a season, more than a season of football. It is the clearest case for screening the heart before the season rather than the sport. | LOOK IT UP — the heart, not the game |
| Tennis, bowling, golf, yoga | 0 | 0.03–0.08 | Falls and sprains, and in older players the heart. These are the floor. | BASELINE |
| Rowing (crew) | 0 at HS no direct catastrophic event in the HS tables 1982–2025; college male one direct death (1.07, n=1) | 1.30 female HS (n=1) college male 2.14 (n=2); unstable | The tract's "extremely high injury sport" (TP 35.0.5). The record: USRowing logged zero member deaths in 2024, three in 2022 and four in 2021, all drownings; British Rowing's are cardiac. The injury profile is low-back pain (32–53% of rowers a year) and rib stress fractures (6–12%). The crab the tract describes is real and its outcome is not: no documented case of paralysis from the oar handle was found; the one documented death (Northwestern, 2017) was a non-swimmer knocked overboard by the handle during a crab who drowned. British Rowing counts two capsize deaths in the UK in 2000–21, both of rowers who left the boat and swam for shore. The claim is examined in the counterweights. | BASELINE — life jackets and cold-water rules are the real controls |
| Outrigger canoe racing | no catastrophic series exists | — | Simone's proposed swap for crew (TP 35.0.5). Two small surveys: 42% of New Zealand paddlers injured in the prior year, 1.8 injuries per 1,000 hours, nearly all shoulder and low-back sprains and strains; Brazilian paddlers 45% ever injured, mostly back. Same water exposure as rowing ("your boat might flip"), same overuse profile, no catastrophic register. The swap changes nothing measurable; see Exhibit F. | BASELINE — same as crew |
What the table shows. The school-sport ladder is men's gymnastics, men's ice hockey, football, cheerleading, women's gymnastics, lacrosse, wrestling, and then a long tail that is safer than the car ride to practice. Pole vault, which nobody names, was for two decades the deadliest thing a school offered per participant. Rowing, which the tract names, is at the bottom with tennis. And across the table the heart kills more athletes than the sport does: basketball, which has no direct catastrophic record worth printing, has the highest indirect death rate in college athletics. Three practical readings follow for a parent doing the tract's lookup: ask whether the sport puts the child's head below the body at speed (gymnastics, cheer stunts, hockey checking, pole vault, head-down tackling); ask whether a defibrillator is at the venue; and ask for a cardiac screen if the child will be exerting at the college level. The sport's reputation is almost useless as a guide.
The tract supplies the yardstick itself: "every time you get in a car, you're risking your life" (TP 35.0.5). These are the figures that make the ladder legible. Two of them do most of the work. An hour in a car is about 0.4 micromorts, and that is the unit the grades above are built on ("ten times the road" means 4 micromorts an hour). And simply being alive costs a thirty-year-old about 3.5 micromorts a day and a fifty-year-old about 11, which is the number a hobby has to be compared with before anyone calls it "high probability." A single skydive adds roughly a day's worth of background risk to the day. A BASE jump adds four months' worth. An attempt on Everest adds eight years' worth.
| Baseline | Figure | Micromorts | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Being alive, age 30 | Annual probability of death 0.127% (men 0.176%, women 0.077%), all causes | 3.5 per day men 4.8 · women 2.1 | NCHS, United States Life Tables 2024 (Aug 2026) |
| Being alive, age 50 | Annual probability of death 0.390% (men 0.489%, women 0.291%) | 10.7 per day men 13.4 · women 8.0 | Same |
| Driving, all road users | 39,254 deaths in 2024; 1.19 per 100 million vehicle-miles | 1.2 per 100 miles ≈0.4 per hour at 35 mph | NHTSA, Overview of Motor Vehicle Traffic Crashes in 2024 (Apr 2026) |
| Passenger-car occupant | 1.05 per 100 million vehicle-miles (2024) | 1.05 per 100 miles ≈0.35–0.4 per hour | NHTSA Traffic Safety Facts 2024: Motorcycles |
| Motorcyclist | 6,228 deaths in 2024; 28.0 per 100 million vehicle-miles, 27 times the car-occupant rate per mile | 28 per 100 miles ≈11 per hour at 40 mph | Same |
| Airline passenger | One death per 13.7 million boardings worldwide 2018–22; one per 33 million in the safest countries; no US scheduled-airline passenger deaths in 2023 or 2024 | 0.07 per flight (world) · 0.03 (US tier) ≈0.02–0.04 per hour | Barnett & Reig Torra, J. Air Transport Management 2024; NTSB |
| General aviation (private flying) | 0.65 fatal accidents per 100,000 flight hours in 2023 (0.89 in 2013); most fatal crashes kill everyone aboard | ≈5–7 per hour aboard roughly 100× the airline rate, 15× the car | AOPA Air Safety Institute, 35th McSpadden Report (Nov 2025) |
| Running a marathon | Cardiac arrest 1.01 per 100,000 marathon runners 2000–10; deaths 0.20–0.39 per 100,000 across all road races; about four deaths a year in the US | 2–7 per race ≈1–2 per hour | Kim et al., NEJM 2012; RACER 2, JAMA 2025 |
| Giving birth (US) | Maternal mortality 18.6 per 100,000 live births (2023) | ≈190 per birth | NCHS Health E-Stat, 2025 |
| A night of video games | No systematic mortality; the documented deaths are isolated pulmonary emboli after multi-day sessions | ≈0 | Case reports; the tract's own zero (TP 35.0.5) |
How to read the ladder with these in hand. Anything under about 0.4 micromorts an hour is cheaper than driving to it, and the sin as written has nothing to say about it. Anything in the single digits per hour is the band where motorcycles, light aircraft, hang gliders and a skydive live, and where the tract's substitution question has real force because the alternatives are usually a few hundredths of a micromort. Anything in the hundreds or thousands per outing has left the territory of "risk" in the ordinary sense; a BASE jumper at 430 micromorts a jump who jumps a hundred times a year is running about a 4% annual death rate, which is the mortality of a seventy-nine-year-old. Childbirth is printed because it is the clearest case of a large, purposeful, non-recreational risk, about forty BASE-jumps' worth of micromorts, that the rule as written does not touch, and it is the standard answer to anyone who thinks the sin is about risk rather than about needless risk.
Tract 13's test is comparative, and Simone states the principle: take the vice and turn it "into a virtue while still getting the thing, like most of the thing out of the vice that you liked" (TP 35.0.5). The corpus names four swaps of its own. This table grades those four against the data above and adds the swaps the data suggests for the rows that scored worst. A swap lands when it keeps most of the sensation and drops the risk by an order of magnitude or more; it is partial when it drops the risk but changes the activity, or when its own risk is not trivial; it fails when the premise behind it is wrong or the substitute is not safer.
Simone's own swap (TP 35.0.5). The jump is 430 micromorts; nobody has ever been able to compute a per-plunge death rate for cold water because the deaths are too few to count against the exposures. The direction is beyond argument. But the plunge is not zero, and the mechanism is specific: cold shock peaks at water of 10–15 °C and is maximal in the first thirty seconds (a gasp underwater is a drowning), and putting the face in while holding the breath can produce the "autonomic conflict" arrhythmia the Portsmouth group describes; UK open-water swimming deaths rose from 34 to 61 between 2018 and 2021, the years the cold-dip fashion arrived; a Finnish winter-swimmer cohort showed cardiovascular mortality about a tenth above expected (thin). The conditions that follow from the mechanism: a tub or barrel at home rather than open water, entry slow and face out of the water for the first minute, never alone, and not at all with a known cardiac history or a long-QT drug. Done that way, the swap converts a 4%-a-year hobby into a bath.
Simone's description of freefall ("as it turns out, just feels windy... if you've ever leaned into a heavy wind that can hold you up... you have experienced what it feels like to skydive") is the business model of indoor skydiving. No fatality in a wind tunnel was found in any peer-reviewed, regulatory or news source; the signature injury is an anterior shoulder dislocation from an arm caught in the airflow against the wall, and one 2022 lawsuit alleges quadriplegia after a head-first wall strike. Against two to five micromorts a jump, and against the "buildup" Simone says is the real high (the hangar, the climb, the door), the tunnel keeps the physical sensation and loses the ritual. Whether the ritual is the thing being enjoyed is the only question the data cannot answer, and the tract's position on that is already written: if the thrill needs the mortality to work, that is the sin.
Simone's swap rests on Malcolm's claim that crew is "extremely high injury" because catching a crab throws the oar into the face, "easy to become paralyzed." Exhibit D: rowing has no direct catastrophic event in forty-three years of the high-school registry, its injuries are low-back pain and rib stress fractures, and the one documented crab death was a non-swimmer knocked overboard who drowned. Outrigger paddling has the same overuse profile (1.8 injuries per 1,000 hours, shoulder and back) and the same water. Both are baseline sports whose only serious risk is cold water without a life jacket. The swap changes nothing measurable. The right lookup for either boat is the water temperature and the jacket rule, not the oar.
Malcolm's swap for the "line simulator" (TP 35.0.5): "a little inflatable boat with a small motor" on nearby lakes with the children. Recreational boating killed 556 Americans in 2024; 87% of the drowned wore no life jacket; four in five drownings were from boats under 21 feet; alcohol was the leading factor and 69% of the dead had an operator with no safety instruction. A theme park, for all its sins of time and money, does not appear on any mortality table. The boat is the better afternoon by every measure the tract cares about and it is also the only one of the two that can kill a child, and the whole of that risk sits in one omitted item of clothing. Jackets on everyone, no drink, and the swap lands; otherwise the family has walked from Exhibit E to Exhibit A to save a queue.
Each step down drops the risk by orders of magnitude: a fall that is certainly fatal, then 0.13 deaths per 1,000 hours outdoors on the one rate that exists, then zero deaths in 515,337 gym visits. The movement, the grades and most of the fear are the same; the gym has the lowest injury rate of any sport with a measured one.
Nine micromorts a touring day against under one a resort day, and the resort's catastrophic rate is one per million visits. The resort has the skiing and not the avalanche; what it does not have is the solitude, which is the thing to be honest about wanting.
Each removes the single mechanism that produces the catastrophic record (head-down contact; the basket toss onto a floor; blows to the head) and keeps the sport. The evidence is unusually direct, because each swap has already been run as a rule change and the registry moved: the basket-toss rule cut cheerleading's catastrophic injuries about fourfold, and grappling arts run 9–32 injuries per 1,000 exposures against 229 for mixed martial arts with no deaths in the tournament series.
The motorcycle's deaths are mostly other people's cars: nearly half of two-vehicle fatal crashes are a driver turning left across the rider. Insurer data put circuit racing of every category under 0.1 deaths per 1,000 licence-holders a year, which is less than a year of ordinary driving; no rate is published for track days. The lean and the speed exist on a closed course without the left-turning minivan, and the numbers that exist say the course is the safer place for them. The honest caveats are that the track data are thin and that most riders' pleasure is the road itself, for which the only swap is the car at a twenty-seventh of the per-mile risk.
No exposure rate exists, so no machine can be shown to be safer than another on the data. What the data does show is who dies: children under sixteen are 12–15% of the deaths and 27% of the injuries, overwhelmingly on adult-sized machines, with helmets on fewer than a third. The swap the numbers support is not a different vehicle but the manufacturers' own age labels, a helmet, and no passengers. For an adult who rides within those rules the risk is unmeasured, which is not the same as acceptable.
The product swaps (nets, pads, in-ground installation) do not move the injury rate, and the trampoline park is worse per visit than the yard. The one finding that bears weight is that three-quarters of injuries happen with more than one child on the mat and the smallest is the one hurt. The paediatricians' position is not to own one. If the household owns one anyway, the swap is a rule, not a purchase.
Intuitively the safe version, and for a healthy forty-year-old it is. But Hawaii loses about 21 snorkelers a year, 92% of them visitors, mean age 58, 27% cardiac, more than it loses scuba divers; the shallow, unsupervised, exerting-while-face-down activity is the one that finds the undiagnosed heart. No rate exists, but the direction is a warning that "safer" has an age attached to it.
The same fall, into water whose depth and bottom are known. Competitive diving has no catastrophic record worth printing (Exhibit D); tombstoning's injuries are spinal and its injury-to-death ratio is about three to one.
Cardiac arrest runs 1.01 per 100,000 in the marathon and 0.27 in the half; two-thirds of triathlon deaths are in the open-water swim, and men over sixty run 18.6 per 100,000, about ten times the field. Nearly half of the triathlon dead had a heart abnormality at autopsy. The swap that the data supports is partly distance and format and mostly a visit to a cardiologist, which is also the lookup Exhibit D says a basketball parent should do.
Four-sided isolation fencing with a self-latching gate is the one pool intervention with strong evidence; alarms and covers are weaker. It does not remove the pool; it removes the toddler's unsupervised route to it, which is the entire mechanism.
BASE jumping (430 a jump) and free solo are confirmed in their own band; hang gliding and paragliding join them by the year (400–470). Skydiving is demoted: two to five micromorts a jump, a few hours of driving, with a record-low year in 2024, but still ten times the road per hour and with a wind tunnel available, so JUSTIFY OR SWAP. Personal flying is 5–7 an hour, fifteen times the car. Ballooning is 3–5 a flight on an unverified denominator. Bungee jumping has no data at all, and "nobody has counted" is not a grade of safe.
Every big mountain (Everest 7,000–10,000 an attempt, Annapurna 40,000, Denali 2,000–3,000, the Matterhorn and Mont Blanc in the thousands), cave diving (300 a dive), canyoneering (2,500 a year), rebreather diving (18–38 a dive), international rally (5,700 a year), and alpine climbing on the one per-hour rate that exists (130 an hour). None appears in the corpus. All are OWN BAND.
Motorcycles 6,200 a year, 11 micromorts an hour, 670 per registered bike per year; ATVs and side-by-sides 750–1,000, a hundred of them children; boating 556, 87% without a life jacket; snowmobiles something like 100–200; e-bikes and e-scooters 135 and rising fastest. The corpus names only the motorcycle, once, as "racing motorcycles" in a chapter about marriage contracts. These are the hobbies where the sin is actually being committed at scale.
Diving into shallow water (the leading recreational cause of spinal cord injury), the backyard trampoline (100,000 ER visits, several hundred permanent neurological injuries, nets useless), cheer stunts, tackle football, gymnastics, hockey, pole vault, boxing and judo. One anatomy, the cervical spine; one question, whether the head goes down first; and every mitigation that ever worked was a rule, not a product.
Rowing has no direct catastrophic event in forty-three years of the school registry and ranks with tennis. The crab-to-paralysis mechanism is not in the literature; the one crab death was a drowning. The outrigger swap changes nothing. The tract's example is wrong and the page says so (Exhibit D, Exhibit F, counterweight 1).
An hour in a car is 0.4; a day alive at thirty is 3.5 and at fifty 11; childbirth is about 190. Resort skiing, sailing, surfing, swimming, hiking, running, the climbing gym, golf, tennis, pickleball and the sofa are all at or under the road. The rule as written has nothing to say about them, and the car ride to them is usually the most dangerous part of the day.
The numbers and arguments that fight this reading, kept in public and graded. Several land, and three of them land on the corpus rather than on the page.
Tract 13 holds up crew as the example of an "extremely high injury sport," with a mechanism (the crab, the oar handle, "easy to become paralyzed"), and uses it to make the general point that the sport's reputation is not its risk. The general point is right and the example is backwards. Forty-three years of the catastrophic registry record no direct catastrophic event in high-school rowing; USRowing logged zero member deaths in 2024; the injuries are backs and ribs; the one documented crab death was a non-swimmer who went overboard and drowned, and no paralysis from the handle is on record anywhere. The sport that the tract should have reached for in that sentence, with 65% of all catastrophic injuries to high-school girls, is the one the Pragmatist's Guide did reach for: cheerleading.
Nine deaths in 3.9 million US jumps in 2024 is a rate of 2.3 micromorts a jump, which is about six hours of driving, and a tandem jump is about two. Anyone arguing that the tract's flagship example is "no more dangerous than the drive to the drop zone" has the arithmetic. What they do not have is the tract's test, which is comparative: the jump is still ten times the road per hour, the alternative that delivers the sensation is a wind tunnel at effectively zero, and the tract's own words ("is there really not some other activity that you could get the same amount of marginal enjoyment from") settle the grade at JUSTIFY OR SWAP. Demoted from the top of the list, where it never belonged; not removed.
True in the literal sense for everything below the top band: a motorcycle hour is eleven in a million. But the tract's word is probability and its test is comparative, and the band structure of this page is the answer: the top band (BASE at one in 2,300, Annapurna at one in 25, cave diving at one in 3,300) is a high probability of death by any standard a prudent person uses, and the middle band is "ten or more times the alternative," which is what "needless" means in numbers. The phrase "high probability" in the rule should be read as "a probability that is high relative to the thing you could do instead," which is how the tract uses it.
Driving is the floor of every comparison on this page and is also, by hours, most Americans' largest accumulated recreational risk, since the trip to the trailhead is driving. The tract knows this ("every time you get in a car, you're risking your life") and answers with purpose and clustering rather than abstention. That is consistent: the sin is needless risk, and a trip with a purpose is not needless. But it also means the recreational drive to the drop zone is part of the drop zone's cost, that a four-hour round trip to ski (1.6 micromorts) costs more than the day on the slope (0.8), and that the honest lookup for most weekend plans is the mileage.
A US birth carries about 190 micromorts, forty BASE jumps' worth, and the corpus commands it. The Oath of Preservation (TP 35.0.5) commands a believer to confront an armed attacker rather than die unarmed, which is a large purposeful risk taken for others. The tract's own word, "meaninglessly," is the whole reconciliation: this sin prices risk taken for a thrill and nothing else, and the same number on the table is a sin in one life and a duty in another. The page prices the activity; the reader supplies the purpose; the reader should notice how easily a purpose can be supplied after the fact.
Simone's swap is proposed as "a virtue," with health benefits. The water people's literature treats cold immersion as a hazard with a known mechanism (cold shock, autonomic conflict, incapacitation after ten minutes) and the UK's open-water death rise coincides with the fashion. Against 430 a jump the direction is unarguable; against "virtue" the data says "much safer vice with its own rules," which Exhibit F lists. It is the same conclusion the corpus reached about fasting on Meat and Drink: the training is permitted, the halo is not.
Malcolm's Disneyland substitute is recreational boating, which the Coast Guard records killing 556 people in 2024, 87% of the drowned without a life jacket, most of them from boats the size of his. The theme park has no such table. The fix is a jacket on each child and the adult, after which the lake is the better afternoon on every axis. It is printed because it is the clearest case on the page of the tract's own rule, "look it up before you sign up," applied to the tract's own alternative.
TP 23.0: "that's what it is to be a pronatalist. It's a fundamental belief that my body is disposable. My kids are the next better iteration of me." So the recreation rule cannot rest on the sanctity of the body, and the corpus does not rest it there; it rests it on "everyone that's counting on you and your ability to do anything in the future" (TP 35.0.5). That foundation makes the sin person-relative in a way the tables cannot be: the same 430-micromort jump is a different sin for a father of five than for a childless twenty-two-year-old, and Simone concedes exactly this about the family next to the gymnastics gym ("one person's sin could be another person's perfectly good thing"). The page prints one number per activity and leaves the multiplier to the reader, which is the only honest way to do it and which the reader will find convenient.
In most school sports the indirect deaths (sudden cardiac arrest, heat, sickle cell) outnumber the direct ones, and the highest death rate in college athletics belongs to men's basketball, a sport with no catastrophic injury record at all (one sudden cardiac death per 5,200 Division I athlete-years, about 190 micromorts a season). Triathlon's deaths are in the swim and nearly half the dead had a heart abnormality. The tract tells a student to look up the injury rate of the sport; the data say the more useful lookup is a cardiac screen and a defibrillator at the venue. This is not thrill-seeking at all, and the sin's logic (an avoidable death with dependents) applies to it anyway.
Bungee jumping, dirt bikes, US snowmobiling, US horse riding, street racing since 2010, trampoline deaths since 2009, ziplines, wingsuit flying: none has a usable rate, and several have no count. "Look it up" cannot be obeyed for them. The page's rule for that case is that an unmeasured activity is graded as unmeasured, not as safe, and is placed by its nearest measured neighbour (the dirt bike beside the ATV). A reader who finds the gap frustrating has understood the tract: the duty is real and the data are not always there to meet it.
Basketball produced 435,000 ER visits in 2018, more than any activity on the page, because a hundred million people play it. Exhibit C's totals rank exposure as much as danger, which is why that table leans on mechanism and child share rather than on the count, and why it is not the ladder. Anyone quoting "trampolines, 100,000 injuries" against "skydiving, 16 deaths" has compared a numerator to a numerator.
The people in the top band are not there by accident of hobby choice, and a wind tunnel may not scratch what a cliff scratches. The corpus's two answers are the swap (Exhibit F: most rows have one that keeps the physical sensation) and the partner clause (TPG 47.4.1: a contract, written by the person giving the thing up, with thresholds). The data cannot say whether the swaps satisfy; it can say that for every activity in the top two bands except BASE, free solo and the big mountains, an alternative exists that delivers the motion, the speed, the height or the water at a tenth of the risk or less. Where none exists, the tract's answer is already written.
Not a corpus claim, but the most repeated number in this whole field, and anyone doing the tract's lookup will meet it. It traces to a single sentence in a 1985 sports-medicine textbook chapter (Firth, "Equestrian Injuries") with no exposure data behind it, cited by the CDC in 1990 with the explicit warning that no rider-exposure denominators exist, and recycled for forty years with the units drifting (hours to exposures, 7,000 to 7,500) and the attribution drifting (to the CDC, to a British spinal unit, to a 2009 pharmacology editorial). The best current estimate is 0.5 micromorts a ride, near the car. The horse's real record is in the injury column, where it is heavy, and in the helmet, where it is fixable.
The claim is narrow and the numbers carry it: the tract's sin, read as written, is a probability of death or life-changing injury taken for a thrill when a substitute for the thrill exists; measured, the activities that most commit it are not the ones the tract names but the motorcycle, the ATV, the snowmobile, the unjacketed boat, every big mountain and every cave; the activities that most produce the injury half of the clause are the ones in the backyard and the school gym; and the tract's own examples sort out as two confirmed (BASE, free solo), two confirmed by the year (hang gliding, paragliding), one demoted (skydiving), one unmeasurable (bungee), and one wrong (crew). That is the lookup the tract asked for, with the counterweights standing.
What the evidence refuses is the comfortable position in both directions. It refuses the reader who hears "skydiving is a sin" and concludes that the motorcycle in the garage, ridden for pleasure on Sundays at eleven micromorts an hour, is not. It refuses the reader who hears "two micromorts a jump" and concludes the tract was wrong about skydiving; the tract's test is comparative and the wind tunnel exists. It refuses the parent who forbids the skydive at eighteen and bought the trampoline at six. And it refuses the reading of the sin as "risk": childbirth, the armed defence of the household and the drive to work carry numbers on this page and are not on this page.
For this household specifically, the file converts four scattered remarks into one instruction with a table under it. The ranking machine of Tract 13 gets its death column filled in. The sin list of Tract 12 gets its fifteenth entry re-illustrated with the examples that the numbers support. The Pragmatist's Guide's four hobbies turn out to be the best-chosen list in the corpus, and the one the tracts should have used. And the duty to look it up, which the tract says is itself a matter of sin, now has a page to look at, with every number sourced so that the next person can check it rather than trust it.
Method. Working scratch page, first pass 2026-10-24, written against the four corpus passages named above. Every figure is a rate with its denominator stated, converted to micromorts where the denominator permits, and marked thin, disputed or unmeasured where the source warrants it; conversions are arithmetic from the cited figures (speeds assumed for per-hour conversions: car 35 mph, motorcycle 40 mph, bicycle 10 mph, skateboard 8 mph). Where secondary sources disagreed the range is printed. Numbers collected October 2026; the most recent available year is used and named. Corpus positions are cited by citation ID; the two tracts behind the page are linked in the header.
Principal sources. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Traffic Safety Facts (motorcycles 2023 and 2024; bicyclists 2024; overview 2024). Consumer Product Safety Commission: NEISS data highlights 2018; Report of Deaths and Injuries Involving Off-Highway Vehicles 2025; Micromobility Products-Related Deaths, Injuries and Hazard Patterns 2017–2024; Pool or Spa Submersion 2024; fireworks 2025; go-karts 1998; playgrounds. US Coast Guard, Recreational Boating Statistics 2024. United States Parachute Association, fatality summaries 2024 and 2025. Divers Alert Network annual reports; Buzzacott et al., Public Health 2018; Tillmans et al., Diving and Hyperbaric Medicine 2024; Cave Diving Group (UK). National Center for Catastrophic Sport Injury Research, All Sport Catastrophic Injury Report 1982/83–2024/25, Annual Survey of Football Injury Research and Catastrophic Football Injuries 2025; Boden et al. 2003 and 2012; Harmon et al., Circulation 2015. American Academy of Pediatrics, trampoline policy statement 2012; Kasmire et al., Pediatrics 2016. National Spinal Cord Injury Statistical Center, Facts and Figures 2023 and Recent Trends in Causes of SCI. American Whitewater accident database; America Outdoors; Nathanson et al. 2016. CDC MMWR drowning Vital Signs 2024; Moreland et al. 2022; Levitt 2001. Tipton et al., Cold Water Therapies: Minimising Risks; Shattock & Tipton 2012. Søreide et al., J Trauma 2007; Mei-Dan et al. 2013; Bouchat & Brymer 2019; BASE Fatality List. Feletti et al. 2017; USHPA fatality reports. AOPA Air Safety Institute, McSpadden Report 2025; Ballard et al. 2013. Himalayan Database, Himalaya by the Numbers 2nd ed.; Firth et al., BMJ 2008; Huey et al. 2020; Dodge et al. 2025; McIntosh et al. 2008; NPS Denali 2025. Winkler, Fischer & Techel, ISSW 2016; Colorado Avalanche Information Center. Schöffl et al. 2013; Neuhof et al. 2011; American Alpine Club, Accidents in North American Climbing. Butterwick et al. 2011; Hitchens et al., MJA 2009. Kim et al., NEJM 2012; RACER 2, JAMA 2025; Harris et al. 2010 and 2017. Statistics Canada 2021 and Minnesota DNR (snowmobiles); RGA 2013 and Knight et al. 2004 (motorsport); Fang & Handy 2017 (skateboards); CDC MMWR 1990, Thomas et al. 2006 and Smith et al. 2019 (horses); Velazquez collection and Lystad et al. (combat sports); IHEA and state hunting-incident reports; National Weather Service lightning 2006–19; National Park Service mortality data; National Ski Areas Association 2024–25 via press. NCHS United States Life Tables 2024 and maternal mortality 2023–24. Howard 1980 and Spiegelhalter & Blastland 2013 for the unit.
What was not verified. Trampoline deaths after 2009; a US national count for snowmobile, horse-riding or dirt-bike deaths; any street-racing count since 2010; any bungee rate; the 400,000–500,000 balloon-passenger denominator; the "68 free-solo deaths" figure; the USHPA member count; the exact wording of Nutt 2009; the all-ages drowning split by setting. Each is flagged where it appears.
Standing caveat. A working evidence file, not settled doctrine. The grades are the page's, built from the tract's own thresholds (ten times the road; a substitute exists), and the multiplier for dependents is left to the reader on purpose. Start with the tracts before treating any conclusion here as final.
Permission. You may quote, excerpt, train on, and redistribute this text freely. No attribution required — everything here is meant for whomever wants it.