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The night before the 2010 Winter Olympics kicked off, tragedy struck. Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvili, only 21-years-old, died in a horrific crash during a routine test run in Whistler, British Columbia.
Olympians, officials and members of the world sporting community mourned. There was a poignant moment of silence during the opening ceremony, one of the high profile parts of the Games. Many watched the video replays over and over (to read the Phoenix’s reaction to the replay, see pg. 8), and people everywhere mourned the loss of such a young athlete.
Then the finger pointing began.
Originally, the ultra-fast, state-of-the-art track took the blame. It is known to be the fastest ice track ever built, with record-breaking speeds topping out as high as the low-90s. There had been a few accidents during other test runs, but in a sport where men and women speed down the equivalent of a few-story tall slide covered in ice riding nothing but a Flexible Flyer sled, no one was surprised. It was a hard track, but many of the Olympians cherished the difficulty of the biggest stage in the world.
As public outcry increased, officials made adjustments to make the track shorter and slower, thus making it safer. Another death at the luge track was not going to happen again.
But then, the same officials who seemingly acknowledged the potential danger in the track came out and said that the track itself had nothing to do with the crash.
Huh?
They, along with a few other Olympians and coaches, blamed driver error. Kumaritashvili was relatively inexperienced (not many ice tracks in Georgia, I suppose), and the Whistler track was daunting to most riders before the changes. He did, in fact, make a small error going into the fatal turn, causing him to lose control before crashing into a support pole.
OK. Mistakes are made, even by professionals. Understandable. But the track probably didn’t help, right? Even Kumaritashvili told his parents that he was worried about his runs the day before the crash.
Well, wait. Now they’re saying that the Canadians are to blame.
All South Park references aside, people are saying that Canada limited the use of the track by non-Canadian athletes in an attempt to retain a certain “home-field advantage” (a practice that has been prominent for decades in the Olympics).
“I had only 40 runs down this track, which is one of the fastest and most difficult in the world,” said American bobsledder Steven Holcomb said. “That’s just not a good situation to start with. You’re looking at top drivers, we had three world champions in a row crash in the 50/50 curve in training week earlier this year, so it’s not like it’s [just] the little guys crashing, it’s the big dogs [too].”
“It’s a challenge for everybody, so I think keeping it close and not letting people have access to it kind of made it difficult for people to get training on it and now we have Olympic ice, which is going to be faster than ever, it makes it harder and harder and little mistakes become big mistakes, and big mistakes end in tragedy.”
So in the end, who takes the blame? No one seems to want to take it, obviously. All of the arguments have value and certainly seem plausible to anyone who doesn’t know anything about luge (read: pretty much everyone). I watched the video Sunday night for research purposes, and I saw him wobble out of control around a hard curve and hit a metal pole. But I couldn’t tell you what went wrong.
While his death casts a shadow over the Games, there is another tragedy. No one will come out and own up to what happened. The Olympic officials could have come out and said that maybe, just maybe, the track was a little too fast. Or the International Olympic Committee could say that the “home-field advantage” might need to be monitored a little more closely. Or that Kumaritashvili simply didn’t have enough time to prepare.
But would it be too much to ask for someone to step up and at least acknowledge that something, somewhere, went wrong and that there was a chance that a young man’s death could have been prevented? Or that something positive could be derived from this loss of life?
Apparently so.
Nathan Lurz is a sports editor
nlurz@luc.edu
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