555 RAAW Gravity Racing is a UCI Mountain Bike Team racing downhill World Cups. The young team consists of four riders aged between 17 and 27. Injuries, and particularly head injuries, unfortunately go hand in hand with the sport. Cuts, bruises and broken bones are very tangible, obvious to the laymen and medic alike and treatment is advanced and well understood.
Head injuries and traumatic brain injuries, known as concussion, are very different. They can occur from just riding fast over rough terrain, landing jumps and drops in addition to more obvious impacts following crashes. Although there are some classic symptoms we currently have no way of monitoring, recording or accurately diagnosing these injuries which can occur from either a one off bang as well as an accumulation of smaller knocks.
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We have a duty of care and moral obligation to look after our riders and do everything we can to utilise available tech in order to prevent all injuries to our riders.
When I heard about HIT Ltd and the fantastic, cutting edge research they were conducting on monitoring, recording and analysing the data from head impacts it was an absolute no brainer to work with them, excuse the pun! —Mark Goodwill, 555 RAAW Gravity Racing Team Manager
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The small, inexpensive unit from HIT Ltd fastens safely onto the helmet and is light enough that the rider is oblivious to its existence, but the unit continually monitors impacts. The data is downloaded to the bespoke companion app giving the rider a clear indication of impacts personalised for their age, weight and activity.
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This personalisation is important as a recent scientific paper in Orthopaedic Journal of Sports Medicine concludes female athletes are more susceptible to concussions and experience worse outcomes than male athletes.
This technology possesses such promise and benefit that it would be great to see a day where it’s widely accepted and utilized as well as closer to being a mandatory process in bike racing. It offers the ability to not only manage concussions but also all the data and experience obtained will help go towards understanding brain traumas and treatment better and potentially aiding helmet manufacturers improve helmet safety.
—Mark Goodwill, 555 RAAW Gravity Racing Team Manager
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As someone who has unfortunately suffered multiple concussions in the past, head safety is something that I now consider particularly important. I believe we should take a lot of care when it comes to potential brain injuries, however, sometimes it can still be hard to make the correct decisions regarding them especially if no major issues are shown at the time. Hopefully access to the correct data can improve the informed decision-making process when things aren’t clear so that brain health isn’t compromised. Going forward, HIT and their product have potential to play an important role in the sport, I’m genuinely pleased to be promoting their product!—Luke Williamson, 555 RAAW Gravity Racing
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Often we speak to riders and keep hearing ‘When you crash often you dust yourself off, check the bike’s okay, make sure there’s no pain or visible injury and back on the bike to continue riding’. Concussion and brain injuries in general are the only injuries where you’re asking the injured organ to self-diagnose. There is no pain, just often confusion and reliance on symptom identification. The margin for error with elite mountain biking is tiny, and if you’re riding impaired, even the slightest loss of focus can lead to catastrophic accidents and injury, let alone drop in performance. Thats where HIT can protect by providing instant severity, knowledge and clarity of head impact incidents.
As athletes, pros and every day riders, we want to track the speed, the amount of steps, our heartrate and more. Yet we don’t check the severity of impact to the head when landing a jump hard or taking a tumble. Everyone is so concerned about brain injury, and as one of the most severe injuries long-term that you can suffer, the need to know when to continue or stop is massively neglected. HIT aims to recognise, remove and assess, letting the rider or coach know when to take further action, when to dust yourself off and continue or when to take time to let the dust settle seeking further care.
In simple terms HIT provides, instant clarity of g-force severity, objective data knowledge and a bespoke cognitive brain passport that’s unbiased and unaffected by situation, event or feeling.
We are delighted to be working with 555 RAAW Gravity Racing who are taking massive steps forward in rider safety, education and taking note of head injuries by using HIT to recognise risky impacts early and take the steps to remove riders and assess to take the immediate steps to recover before it compounds and amounts to significant time out of the sport.—Euan Bowen, HIT
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Crashes are part of our sport, but the amount of experience around brain injuries is limited. The right amount of recovery for brain injury used to be hard to determine and the decision to go back to training was often influenced by other motivations than health alone. Having the racers equipped with the HIT system is a great leap for brain injury protocols, pushing the sport in a safer direction.—RAAW Mountain Bikes
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Learn More about the Tech here.
555 RAAW Gravity Racing is represented by Netperformance.
