Great powder and off-piste skiing and snowboarding go together, and no one is going to ban them, but accidents in recent days in Switzerland have raised the issue of responsibility, moral and legal.

Recent avalanches raise the issue of responsibility

The past five days have seen eight people die from avalanches in Switzerland and more than a dozen others caught by them, with several people hospitalized. Two groups were ski- touring, and in two other cases off-piste skiers and snowboarders appear to have set off avalanches that ended on groomed slopes.

Swiss law

The quick answer is that skiing off-piste is not illegal, but you always carry the risk of setting off avalanches for which you might be held responsible. The tricky part is: who decides if you were responsible, how is it decided and what are the implications if it’s your fault. Police initially seek those who might be responsible for setting off an avalanche, and if they suspect someone is at fault, they file a report with a cantonal magistrate (judge) who is assigned to investigate the case. A judge always investigates in cases of injuries or deaths caused by avalanches, but there have been some cases of damages caused, or even no damages but behaviour judged irresponsible, where a skier or snowboarder was considered to be acting against the public interest.

The Swiss penal code calls for a fine or up to three years in prison if the person acted out of negligence or put a life in danger. In the case of putting several lives in danger the prison sentence can be up to 10 years.

In recent memory people have been fined CHF1,000, according to swissinfo. But they can also be held liable for related expenses, including injuries to other people and cleaning up if an avalanche hits a groomed piste, for example. If a search party, with avalanche dogs and helicopters plus scores of people, is called out to look for people after an avalanche, the cost can soar into the thousands. In the case of the seven people who died Sunday in canton Bern in two avalanches just minutes apart, eight helicopters were called in the first day, then helicopters, private rescue teams and the army were used Monday and Tuesday. A judge is investigating the accident and there is not, for now, any indication that humans caused the two avalanches.

But at what point is someone held responsible? Several factors are typically taken into account, such as whether or not warning signs were ignored, or skiers slipped under fences delimiting zones. A sense of responsibility is taken into consideration. Three off-piste skiers who appear to have set off an avalanche that hit a groomed slope in Anzères did the right thing by stopping to help look for people. They then left, say police and it took police a week to find them. It probably won’t be a point in their favour that they left the scene without giving their names to police, nor did they respond to a police press release asking them to turn themselves in.

Read further

Le Temps newspaper (Fre) and Swiss public broadcast system’s web site, swissinfo, both carry lengthy articles about this today. Le Temps in fact has several related articles, worth taking the time to read. They both interview legal experts and come to the same conclusion, that the Swiss most likely don’t want police on the slopes, monitoring, as they do in Italy.

The Independent has run a lengthy interview with Roger Federer. It makes for cheering reading after an evening spent in growing irritation at the amount of mis-reporting and confused writing on the Internet  about the just-published crtieria for determining which UBS bank accounts will be handed by Switzerland to the US tax authority, the IRS. Roger, I  hope you get a bit more sleep, but babies do eventually learn to sleep, one of life’s great pleasures!

Stories not making front page headlines but that are worth a moment’s reflection:

The US Justice Department says crimes by girls have been rising and by 2004 girls’ crimes were 30 percent of the total by juvenile delinquents. Little research has been done in this area, so no one seems to know why crimes by girls are increasing, although one part of the answer could be changes to the justice system in the US.

Meanwhile, in Copenhagen where the IOC (International Olympic Committee) just awarded the 2016 Games to Rio de Janeiro, the sports group also adopted a number of recommendations. One of these is the challenging Recommendation 66: “The Olympic Movement should strengthen its partnership with the computer game industry in order to explore opportunities to encourage physical activity, and the practice and understanding of sport among the diverse population of computer game users.” (good luck!) Olympic Congress Recommendations in full

And, in a peculiarly American news approach, both Bloomberg and Associated Press have now managed to put Roman Polanski (sex crime escapee) and tax cheats (IRS tax dodgers) into bed together with a lovely duvet-style Swiss feather cover over them (read that: Switzerland and Swiss neutrality = haven for all crimes committed by right-thinking Americans, which indicates editorial confusion).

After this dubious snuggle-down, what comes out is that a) Switzerland is “no longer” a haven, which implies that it has been, for all crimes, while forgetting completely about accurate reporting and b) that Switzerland, tut-tut, will have to live like the rest of the world, which is a sign that the writers, or more probably their editors, haven’t budged since 1980. Switzerland may not be a member of the European Union, but it has adopted much of the legislation, for a start and, frankly, the days when Switzerland was an island of oddity are over. Now Switzerland is as odd as any other country around. Back in 1980 all Swiss stories published in the US had to include gold under the streets of Zurich, cheese with holes, chocolate and cuckoo clocks, even though the Swiss have tried for years to point out that cuckoo clocks are Austrian, not Swiss. As for the other three, my editors at three major US news publications all told me this, at one point or another during the early 1980s. It made for some slightly skewered reporting at the time.

Looks like some things never change, but I’m not talking about the Swiss, who have.

I’m not a golfer: I belong to the league that figures if you want to take a long walk do it without chasing a ball. My worst date ever was with a pro who took me to a driving range for the night and didn’t notice I’d stopped swinging. So I’m usually immune to people waxing poetic about gorgeous and challenging golf courses, even though some of my best friends are avid golfers.

I just flew into Lisbon, reading on the plane about the new Amendoeira resort in Portugal’s Algarve; in fact we flew over it coming in, as the sun rose. The sun, I repeat. For while I left Geneva in a downpour that made driving to the airport at 5:30 truly miserable, the weather in southern Portugal is so good it almost makes me want to play golf today, with 18C and sunny skies, the kind of puffball clouds you get only when you’re next to the ocean.

And then I read CNN’s long article on Nick Faldo’s new golf course, which opened 19 October. Hand me a club, someone.

Truth in advertising: what does Michael Phelps really eat for breakfast? If I switch from muesli to Corn Flakes to Wheaties, will my swimming improve? Ad Age talks a lot about the money from food sponsors for Phelps and other top athletes, but they skip over the uncomfortable question of what the fellow really eats for breakfast, which at last report, according to the Guardian (whose brave journalist tried to eat as Michael does – check out the video) didn’t include pre-packaged flakes. Of course, the cereal boxes don’t say he actually eats the stuff.

Updated Wednesday Usain Bolt did it again – running so fast the others in the 100 metres at Lausanne’s Athletissima tonight looked almost slow. But then a funny thing happened. He slowed down, noticeably, before the finish line. It made no difference to winning because he was well ahead. So why would a top athlete do that? Why cheat himself and the rest of us of that glorious moment of going flat out right to the finish line.

The bonus for breaking a world record isn’t quite as big as some others? There is no reason to suspect the Jamaican superstar of calculating his haul in gold bars while streaking down the track, but it’s happened before: that financially savvy pole vaulter Sergey Bubka became notoriously famous for winning by a fraction more each time until he accumulated a surprising amount of wealth. Some of us love to watch the beauty that is a human being going flat out in a sprint. Give us the end of the race, too, please.

For the record: Bolt matched the 2006 meeting record set by Xavier Carter, at 19.63, but fell well short of breaking his 19.30 world record set at the Beijing Olympics

Editor’s note: the 24 Heures sports page, Lausanne asks the same question today: and if Bolt had run hard right to the end?

Sports fans sometimes get a little carried away, something a lot of people in Geneva and Basel probably thought this weekend. But check out this one, in China. Seriously odd! (Ed. note: ChinaGold is a blog written by Liam Bates, who occasionally contributes to GenevaLunch.)

The day is getting long, the dishes aren’t done yet, the e-mails are not all answered -  and suddenly London’s Mail on Sunday offers the opportunity to sink into the black hole of learning more about the rich.

Photo (reproduced with permission, Rick Malman/Alinghi): Ernesto Bertarelli’s Alinghi is the current holder of the sailing world’s America’s Cup. Here, October 2007, he looks at models of "J hull" sailing vessels in the model room of the New York Yacht Club, the Cup’s original home.

While the Sunday Times in Britain churned out its number-heavy list of the country’s wealthiest people the Daily Mail, true to form, spewed curious bits of information about them. We learn that Kirsty Bertarelli nearly died of meningitis when she was young. Her mother is quoted as saying of the daughter’s marriage to a wealthy Swiss man, "You never know what will happen in life. Nobody knows how they are going to end up." I hope she managed a brighter toast than that at the wedding, if women were allowed to toast. No news here on why the Bertarellis are suddenly considered British, while Forbes and Swiss authorities seem to consider them Swiss residents. Spain, France and New York seem to be the places where Ernesto Bertarello spends most of his time these days.

We also learn that Prince Charles is not listed despite having a sizable fortune estimated at

[Update 6 April, text shortened] Geneva-Servette’s Hockey Club’s English fans have banded together and have reserved a large number of tickets for its members. The club’s site has pages in English.

A curious thing has just happened to the Bol d’Or sailing race. An essentially local dispute about the crew of one of the boats surfaced Monday and by midnight last night the Tribune de Geneve, true to its status of city newspaper, had interviewed two of the main characters and published a story. In the process, by grinding it down to a tit-for-tat argument among clicky boat owners on Lake Geneva, with the America’s Cup legal battle as the dramatic background, the newspaper has inadvertently made the event sound to non-locals like a small club feud. The newspaper’s English page, based on the French story, in fact refers only to a "local competition" for D35s and never mentions that it is part of the Bol d’Or.

The D35 catamaran races are just one in a group of Bol d’Or races, albeit one of the more glamorous bits. The Bol d’Or itself is Europe’s largest enclosed water regatta and a hugely popular European event.

The dispute over Russell Coutts and a BMW Oracle team appearing in the D35 race is indeed local. What a shame it would be if the colourful annual Bol d’Or was perceived, even locally, to be small and petty as a result.