Georgian luger taken to Whistler hospital after terrifying crash on track

“It appears after a routine run, the athlete came late out of curve 15 and did not compensate properly to make correct entrance into curve 16,” the statement said. “This resulted in a late entrance into curve 16 and although the athlete worked to correct the problem he eventually lost control of the sled resulting in the tragic accident. The technical officials of the FIL were able to retrace the path of the athlete and concluded there was no indication that the accident was caused by deficiencies in the track.”

While officials did not fault the track, they did make alterations to the course. The Whistler Sliding Centre has created concern since opening in 2007 for its high speeds and frequent crashes.

“Based on these findings the race director, in consultation with the FIL, made the decision to reopen the track following a raising of the walls at the exit of curve 16 and a change in the ice profile,” the statement said. “This was done as a preventative measure, in order to avoid that such an extremely exceptional accident could occur again.”

Quote:

“It appears after a routine run, the athlete came late out of curve 15 and did not compensate properly to make correct entrance into curve 16,” the statement said. “This resulted in a late entrance into curve 16 and although the athlete worked to correct the problem he eventually lost control of the sled resulting in the tragic accident. The technical officials of the FIL were able to retrace the path of the athlete and concluded there was no indication that the accident was caused by deficiencies in the track.”

I think they are playing semantic games with their analysis. While it may be true that the track did not *cause* the crash (nobody said it did), it was the design of the track which allowed the crash to result in a fatal accident

Canada gave athletes from other countries relatively little access to most Olympic venues in an effort to give Canadian athletes a competitive advantage for the Games. That advantage may be diminished on the shorter course.

“We were all ready to race from the top,” Wolfgang Staudinger, the Canadian luge coach, said Saturday. “Then we could have protected our home-field advantage.”

The events offered a curious twist. Some blame for Kumaritashvili’s death was directed at Canadian officials for not letting foreign athletes gain familiarity with a treacherous course known for high speeds and crashes

WHISTLER, British Columbia " Olympic officials treated the death of Nodar Kumaritashvili, the Georgian luge athlete, less as a tragedy than as an inconvenience.

The sport’s international governing body released a callous statement late Friday night, about 10 hours after Kumaritashvili died, publicly blaming the 21-year-old for his own death. Athletes were attaining speeds at the Whistler Sliding Center far exceeding what the track was designed for, but the track was not the problem. It was a user error, the statement implied.

Kumaritashvili failed to compensate properly as he entered Curve 16 before he crashed at nearly 90 miles per hour, the federation’s statement said. It added, “There was no indication that the accident was caused by deficiencies in the track.”

A thorough investigation was supposed to have been conducted. Instead, the luge federation seemed more concerned about getting the track opened again for competition on Saturday than about taking a hard look at the conditions that might have contributed to Kumaritashvili’s death.

There was at least tacit admission Saturday morning that the course was dangerous: the ice had been contoured to direct sleds toward the center of the track. A high wooden wall had been erected just beyond the curve where Kumaritashvili died after crashing into a support post. Signs reading “wet paint” were still stuck to the wall when the first of two training runs began.

The fact that Canadians got extra practice on the course was a point of heated contention even before Kumaritashvili's death, and it only intensified after the accident. Canadian athletes got 250 or more runs in Whistler, while athletes from other countries only got around 40. Such a home-course advantage is customary in the sliding world, but the sheer speed of the Whistler course -- lugers have reached speeds in the high 90s, over 10 mph faster than any other course in the world -- had athletes and coaches questioning the decision to limit access. On Saturday, VANOC officials said the track was opened for extra training in January to all sliders who were lower than 30th in World Cup rankings. Kumaritashvili does not appear to have visited during the extra training period, however.

Canada invested $117 million in its Own the Podium initiative to attempt to top the medal count, and the program's CEO, Roger Jackson, said before the Games that he didn't mind the grumbling from other countries about course access. "I'm glad there's a little nervousness," he said. "That's exactly what we want." Cockerline added that complaints about access are the norm, and that maybe more training time should be granted, but "if we'd given everybody more runs, that's trouble, too. We might win less medals and there was a lot of money invested in that."



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But that’s how the Olympics work; it’s never the fault of the IOC or its sub-groups. These guys make the NCAA look magnanimous and becoming.

In this case, it always goes back to the track. If it was a joke by Fendt’s own previous calculations, what changed? At an awkward press conference Saturday morning, he tried to backtrack and shift his words, saying he was placing speed limits only on future tracks, such as the Sochi, Russia, course for the 2014 Winter Games. Why then but not now? Well, he wouldn’t say. It was a lot of circular talk.

“We are not saying that [the track] is too fast, but the track is fast,” Fendt said, before ordering it be slowed.

Look, no one wanted this young man to die. No one set out to build a track that would be so fast and so challenging that simply mistakes can prove fatal. It just happened.

And the reason is the course. It was the speed, the slope, the row of metal poles looming outside a turn exit without proper walling.

Luge officials knew they had pushed the envelope. They said as much. Then the athletes showed up and began sounding alarms. No one wanted Friday’s nightmare scenario, yet no one displayed the courage to step up and prevent it, to say enough was enough too soon rather than too late. In some ways, that’s understandable; it’s a human facility we all have faced.

That no one was man enough to acknowledge they were wrong, to publicly declare they made a mistake, to even second guess their decisions garners less sympathy.

In the end, no one admitted a thing. They just put up a board, slowed the track down and moved on.

It’s the best and only apology Nodar Kumaritashvili’s family is going to get.

Dan Wetzel is Yahoo! Sports' national columnist. Follow him on Twitter. Send Dan a question or comment for potential use in a future column or webcast.

Obviously we are in the hands of the federation,” IOC spokesman Mark Adams said. “We are completely satisfied with these changes. We think the competition will go ahead as planned and will be very successful.”

Organisers have raised the walls at the exit of curve 16 where the Georgian died and changed the ice profile as preventative measures, despite concluding that there was no indication the accident was caused by any deficiency in the track.

They have also shortened the track by moving the men’s starting spot to the women’s to further cut down the speed of the sled.

Adams said the changes were not undertaken because the speed of the track was described by some as excessive.

“We did not hear anything about excessive speed. Even the crash ratio was very good,” he said.

WHISTLER, Feb 13 (Reuters) - A driving error led to the death of a Georgian Olympic slider and rules must be tightened to prevent competitors not experienced enough from entering major events, Canada luge coach Wolfgang Staudinger said on Saturday.

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Nodar Kumaritashvili was killed in a training crash at the Whistler Sliding Centre on Friday when he lost control at high speed and was launched over the rim of the track before slamming into an unpadded pillar. He was 21.

“It was not a track issue, it was a driving error, 100 percent,” German Staudinger told reporters at the track during training. “We had issues like this before and that happens when you have so-called exotic sliders.

“The guys must know when they enter a track like this that it’s serious business, it’s not a joke,” he added. “The International Federation has to put much tighter rules into place to avoid this in the future.”

Staudinger, a former competitor who won bronze in the doubles events at the 1988 Winter Games in Calgary, said he shared the view of luge officials and Vancouver Games organisers that there was nothing wrong with the track.

“All the top athletes that are experienced and physically fit handled this track with no problems,” he said.

“If you compared with a slalom skier, you had a guy who needed to make a left turn and he went right. I don’t know exactly what happened to that slider in curve 16 but he was completely off line.”

The technical officials for the FIL were able to retrace the path of the athlete and concluded there was no indication that the accident was caused by deficiencies in the track."

"Although he attempted to correct the situation, he shot up into the roof of curve 16, the angle in which he did so resulted in him experiencing a G-force that literally collapsed his body rendering it difficult to control the sled, which in this case he was not able to do," FIL secretary general Svein Romstad said at a press conference with FIL president Josef Fendt and Vancouver Organizing Committee sports vice president Tim Gayda on Saturday. "Once this happened, he was literally at the mercy of the path of the sled."

There is also stupidity potential in construction - not all messups are due to venality, especially given deadlines, which are routine but very stressful.

Georg Hackl, Germany's former three-time luge champion, agreed.

"They have to put high wooden boards there, then the luger doesn't fly off but hits the plank, falls back to the track and slides down," Hackl told the online edition of the Tagesspiegel newspaper.

Hackl said a small driving error and not the speed of the track was to blame.

"It's a track that's significantly faster than any other tracks that we know," Hackl told the newspaper. "At the beginning, it was a great challenge for the athletes. But it's their job to master these demands. And they have. They all have the track under control, including the Georgian. Such a tiny driving error, it can happen."

"He simply was too late coming into the final curve," he added. "What happened was something that no one in the luge world could have imagined for possible."

Hackl said luge specialists assume that the competitors who crash will remain on the track and not fly off.

"In luge accidents are part of our daily routine. In the run before, Armin Zoeggeler, the world's best luger, had a spectacular crash. That's normal. You stand up, shake yourself and ride again.

"We assume that those who crash will stay on the track and we don't pay too much attention to the structures outside the track."

Hackl said the decision to have the men begin from the women's start was made "to please those who don't know anything about the sport."