Luge is not a sport that normally I take much interest in. But the activity has hit the headlines after Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvili [above] was killed practicing for the Winter Olympics which open today in Vancouver. I would like to know how anyone gets into luge. It is hardly a romantic sport. How do you train to be a great luger? To the outsider, it seems an exercise in lunacy. By any normal criteria, this must be considered extremely dangerous. The competitor lies down on his back on a tiny sledge thing that looks like a tea-tray with skids and then launches himself down hill on an artificial ice slope - like the Cresta run - at speeds up to 90 mph feet first. Courses are not straight and involve steering around steeply banked curves as well as keeping a tight line down the centre of the straight bits. Crashes are inevitable but, for the most part, only result in luger and luge parting company and going down the run separately. Crashing must cause a lot of aches and pains and some broken limbs but, surely, it should not be possible to slide over the top of the wall on a bend and hit a steel pole? Mr Kumaritashvili, only 21 years old, did just this. He lost control on a bend, the luge flipped and he slid up the ice, over the top of the wall and into a steel column. It seems that he died almost at once.
It has been decided that the luge event will go ahead anyway. I would have expected that. But what I would not expect and which I think is quite reprehensible is the conclusion that the course is safe and that the accident was caused because the athlete "did not compensate properly going into the bend." I am sorry but that is surely a totally unacceptable remark. Any athlete in the Olympics is trying his utmost to be the best and in the case of luge that means going fast. The athlete needs to have total control while pushing to the limit. Occasionally he will get it wrong - if he did not, there would be no crashes. It is the responsibility of those officials that lay down the rules and regulations and, presumably, inspect the course to ensure that if an athlete does get it wrong he can crash as safely as possible. And that does not allow for athletes going over the top of the wall into steel poles. The FIL [Federation Internationale Luge] have inspected the track and have concluded that the accident was not caused by deficiencies in the track. However, they tell us, as a preventative measure the walls on the final curve where Nodar Kumaritashvili crashed and died will be raised "in order to avoid that such an exceptional accident should occur again." Well that's alright then. But its not. All the H&S legislation around the world requires that things should fail safe and surely Newton's Laws of Motion will tell us that if a luger has problems on a high speed bend, the likelihood is that he will go up the side wall and over the top - unless his progress is halted by "an externally impressed force". There should be a safety net or padding that stops him before he hits steel girders. I hope all the other bends are safer - just in case there is another exceptional accident.
Apparently, this track in Whistler, Vancouver is regarded as dangerous and prior to this crash several teams have raised concerns about safety. There have been several bad crashes in training runs this week and surely considerably more attention has to be given to safety. I can enjoy watching competitors in all the high speed runs in luge, bob-sleigh, etc. But I expect that if anything goes wrong the athletes are as safe as can be.
I am sure that with a sport as specialist as luge, all the competitors from around the world know each other and feel part of a rather small family. They will be a very sad family this week-end at the start of what should be the peak of their togetherness for an Olympic Games. Young 21 year old men should not be killed doing the thing they love because the safety measures are inadequate and I sincerely hope nothing similar happens to any other luger at these Winter Olympics. All we have here is stable door shutting after the horse has disappeared over the horizon.
My commiserations, for what it's worth, go to Nodar Kumaritashvili, his family his friends and all who knew him.
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