Knee Injury Theory

This is just a hypothesis. To start, I'm neither a pro-rider nor a doctor. However, I've hurt both knees now (hurt the right one this weekend, I think because I was favoring a tweaked left one) this summer. I'd never had a problem with my knees while wakeboarding before this. As I was thinking about the crashes that caused both injuries, they were the same motion. I was in the air (one on a 360 and one just a simple wake to wake off the double-up) and had too much weight back. The board landed parallel to the boat in front of me and the force of the water jacked my knees to my chest and to the side.

There was a knee sprain string on here where someone had the EXACT same thing. In fact they started the thread which was a bit of serendipity for me as mine happened the same weekend and I was stewing on it. Anyway, I noticed that on falls the pros will hold the handle for a bit longer and seemingly always try to hit the water head/upper body first. PB does a dive on most of his. He hurt his knee on a wake skate which I'm guessing he flipped parallel in front of him causing the same motion but that is ONLY A GUESS.

Is this because the Pros have figured out what I'm just figuring out? If your board hits the water first and your weight is too far behind it that is when knee injuries occur.

Seems like a logical line of reasoning to me. I know that you can hyper extend your knee on landings and the such but for the twisting (ACL, MCL) type injuries, this seems like one of the few impacts that will do it.

Thoughts... I'm sure there are expectations but my theory is that this is the predominate way that knees get hurt. The tricky part will be trying to avoid these crashes. It is somewhat unnatural to try to take crashes head first.

One last thing; I also saw a guy, on a Vid here, break both of his ankles with this same motion. That was a failed backroll attempt. Ouch...

Yeah, that was me. Both times that I've hurt my right knee, I'm fairly sure it's been that exact same motion... The first time I was coming down on my second backroll attempt and underrotated some, so I'm not entirely sure how that went down, as at the time I didn't really feel completely aware as to the whole thing...

At times though, I think people may blow out their knees just by landing too stiff legged. There were two blowouts in The Truth (I think), Daniel Doud (is the possible one, he's shown with ice on his knee...), and Collin Harrington's. Neither falls looked like ours did, however, I think the outward/inward pressure put on their knees when they were landing is what did it to them.

I'd say that you're right that there are plenty of knee injuries from doing what we did, but I'd also say that there are a LOT more contributing factors, as I've landed like that dozens of times in the season before this and hadn't had any problems.

I think there are so so many ways that you can get a knee injury. What you've described is just one of them.
Knee injuries are really hard to fathom - I did mine landing a perfectly normal wake jump. Nothing really went wrong, but my knee just decided it had had enough and went 'pop'.
I don't think knees were really designed to cope with a lot of things we do now - I mean wakeboarding - who could have imagined that?!