I disagree. What sports are we talking about here? The sledding in the OP? Who goes into sledding thinking "whelp I can choose between flipping burgers and sledding, guess I'll go sledding"? I expect exactly 0. This sort of niche sports is all people who are into it a bit or a lot, find out they have a talent for it, and then work their asses off (usually against the odds) to become a professional. These are people who will feel mistreated if their chance of doing what they love and get paid for it is taken away from them, exactly 0 of them will say "thanks for saving my brain there". Someone like that wouldn't get into these sports in the first place.

I know nothing about sledding, but I do know about fighting. I can tell you that the people who fight for a living would do it for free or cost reimbursement too, because that's what they've been doing for years before you got paid real money to fight. When I started training there were a few world class fighters who could live off their fighting career, and there were 10x as many who tried and didn't make it and fought anyway; and then there were 100x as many still who knew from the start they didn't make any chance of being a pro fighter and still trained multiple times a week and fought competition a few times a year, for 'prize money' that didn't even cover the cost of the gloves they were wearing.

Any 'needs' of the audience you're talking about is completely orthogonal to the motivation of people doing risky things.