Traditionally, cross-country skiing has been considered a relatively safe sport with few serious injuries compared to alpine skiing or other sports like soccer.

Among the cross-country skiing injuries that were registered at Norwegian regional hospitals in 1997, more than 90% of the injuries were suffered during recreational skiing while only 5-6% occurred during organized ski races.

However, if we want to address the issue of injury risk in cross-country skiing, it is necessary to establish an incidence rate of these injuries by counting the number of injuries occurring in a population for each 1000 individuals who are actively skiing for one day. In other words; the incidence rate is the number of injuries per thousand skiers per day. To arrive at such a figure is not easy, because it requires simultaneous registration of the number/frequency of injuries and the number of skier days (exposure) in an identifiable group of cross-country skiers (population at risk).

Since cross-country skiing is an activity that can be performed at most times and places where snow is found and not only in organized ski-areas where number of persons and ski days may be counted, there is a considerable difficulty assessing the exposure variable (the number of skier days) when estimating injury incidence and risk.

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