After releasing a report that more or less blamed Nodar Kumaritashvili for his own death during Friday’s tragic luge crash, the FIL and VANOC are continuing to take steps to make the ultra-fast Whistler track safer for the athletes.
Olympic Officials Adjust Luge Track After Deadly Crash On Friday
While the FIL’s report concluded that there was “no indication that [Kumaritashvili’s] accident was caused by deficiencies in the track” (aside from it being, you know, simply too fast), officials have already erected a 12-foot tall wooden wall around the steel beams on the final turn as a precaution, as well as changing the ice profile, presumably to make it slower.
As a final precaution, organizers will have the men lugers begin from the women’s start position, according to Reuters. Moving the starting line up will prevent the men lugers from reaching the top-end speeds that have so worried both participants and onlookers during the training sessions at Whistler.
These are all sensible changes. But, for me, the most frustrating thing has been the way Olympic officials have shunted any blame for Friday’s tragedy off of themselves. Beyond their probe that found “no deficiencies” in the track, they described their decision to move the men’s starting position as due to the “emotional component” of the lugers’ psyches, rather than as a simple safety precaution.
It’s just so disingenuous. Yes, luge is a risky sport. If you throw yourself at speeds of 70-90 MPH on a glorified sled down a windy track, you know that bad things can happen. But just because luge is a risky sport, that doesn’t absolve officials of any responsibility to make sure that the conditions are safe. And Whistler’s clearly weren’t: the athletes knew it, as did the officials.
Indeed, if Whistler wasn’t an unsafe risk, why did Olympic officials tell track designers in Sochi not to make a course as fast as the one in Vancouver? Consider this tidbit from a piece on CTVOlympics.ca from last week:
Early in the planning for the 2014 Sochi Games, the Russian hosts were told flatly by the sport’s governing bodies: those speeds at the Whistler Sliding Centre? Don’t even dream of trying to match them.
So these types of speeds were safe for Vancouver but not for Sochi? Of course not. Organizers knew they were pushing the limit with Whistler and didn’t want to replicate that mistake four years from now. They just didn’t have the will to fix the problems at Whistler before tragedy struck. And in doing nothing, they acted recklessly.
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