WHISTLER MEMORY
Luge has changed since Georgian’s death in 2010
KRASNAYA POLYANA, Russia
You can take the train down through these mountains and eat dinner in Adler, the town the world will call Sochi for the next 17 days, and you can be sitting in a restaurant about a kilometre and a half from the Georgian border. Across that border, the town of Bakuriani is maybe a six-hour drive away. Bakuriani was the home of 21-yearold Nodar Kumaritashvili, who died the day the Vancouver Olympics began, four years ago. He was on a training run, slalomed wildly, slid off the track and hit a steel pillar — why were there steel pillars? — and died, fast.
Four years later, luge has returned to a very different Olympic place, and Kumaritashvili is still here, in the shadow of the mountain.
“What happened in Vancouver was really monumental for the sport, obviously, because it changed the way that we were moving,” says Canadian luger Sam Edney, who finished seventh in Vancouver. “Is the sport slowing down? You can see that we go to tracks every year and we’re breaking track records. The technology’s getting better the athletes are getting better, they’re getting stronger, they’re getting faster.
“For us, it’s more the nature of the sport. We want to keep going quicker, and if anything, it’s going to ensure that we’re as quick as possible going down, and that we avoid a tragedy like that ever again.”
Kumaritashvili was going an estimated 143.3 kilometres/hour around the 270-degree Turn 16 at Whistler when he died, on his 26th career run on the track. The world record had already been set at Whistler at 154.3 km/h at the track; that was 14.5 km/h faster than the previous mark, which had been set eight years earlier.
Built on the shady side of this valley, the Sanki Sliding Centre luge track is far different from Whistler. Like Whistler, it’s built next to a stream, on a narrow site. But it’s the only track on Earth with three sections that slope uphill. There are no steel pillars at trackside as the chute screams through its curves. It’s fast, but it will hopefully not produce the kind of lasting shame that Vancouver’s luge track did.
“You go with what the hill is,” says Max Storey, the Sochi track’s Calgary-based project manager. “The (International Luge Federation) asked the track operators (during track testing) to lengthen some crash barriers, like some side walls basically on the track. The negative slopes did keep the speed down.
“With the sliding sports, speed in and of itself is not necessarily a problem; corners in and of themselves are not necessarily a problem. But too much of both at once can be difficult for athletes.”
“One thing you do notice is those little uphill sections; it allows you to have that moment to really collect yourself, refocus for that next section,” says Edney. “Whistler was an intense track from top to bottom, whereas this track gives you a couple sections where you have a moment to gather everything.”
Like Whistler, this track is designed with a maximum speed of 135 km/h; unlike Whistler, it shouldn’t be too much faster.
“I love Whistler; it’s awesome,” says Gregory Carigiet of Switzerland,
‘Whistler was an intense track from top to bottom, whereas this track gives you a couple sections where you have a moment to gather everything.’
MAX STOREY
Calgary-based project manager for Sochi luge track
when asked about the difference between the two tracks. “But you’d go whoosh, whoosh, whoosh through the curves, and if you were not doing good luge, you were f---ed.” Carigiet crashed in a training run at the 2010 Games, and suffered a broken nose and a concussion, and there was a delay while they scraped his blood off the ice.
The Luge Federation blamed Kumaritashvili within 12 hours, right after the opening ceremony, in which the Georgian delegation marched with black arm bands. The dead young man was blamed again in a comprehensive report released two months later. Pilot error, they said, which was true; as noted by U.S. luger Christian Niccum to the New York Times, he let go of his sled.
The fact that the track had caused other competitors, and in fact the president of the International Luge Federation, to express worry — well, that wasn’t deemed as important. And as Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili said at the time, “No sports mistake is supposed to lead to a death. No sports mistake is supposed to be fatal.”
“The nature of the sport is to push the limits and go as quick as possible, and for us, we’re a racing sport, we’re a speed sport … and I think it did show that we were pushing the limits in Vancouver,” says Edney. “But we also know that that’s why we’re in the sport. Because we want to try to get to that extreme.”
And that is the contradiction of several winter sports, as they try to find the edge of possibility without toppling over. There have been safety questions here in Sochi, though much smaller ones — the railings on the slopestyle course were lowered after early complaints from riders, and Thursday women’s downhill training was halted after three racers due to a massive jump near the finish that injured one skier and scared others. The problem was that the test skiers never achieved the speeds of the real racers, and so didn’t fly quite so close to the sun.
Georgia had two lugers in Vancouver, their first entries in luge since 1994; they have none here. Kumaritashvili’s uncle Felix remains the coach of the national luge team.
Sam Borden of the New York Times visited Kumaritashvili’s mother, Dodo, for a story this month. She said she still makes her dead son food every day, before giving it away. You have to think she would have been so proud if her son had been here. She surely would have been here to cheer him on.
The IOC held a one-minute moment of silence for Kumaritashvili before its general assembly Wednesday.
The International Luge Federation said it will hold a private remembrance on the four-year anniversary of his death. A six-hour drive away, perhaps his mother makes him dinner. At the luge track the sun dips over the mountains early in the day, and the shadow remains.