There was a considerable amount of finger pointing last week after Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvili died during a practice run for the Winter Olympics in Vancouver. I saw the video of the crash in which Kumaritashvili flew from his luge after exiting a turn over the 4-foot edge of the track, bounced off a rail and finally smashed head first into a support column – from a speed over 80 mph. He died before arriving at the hospital.
This was made all the more agonizing after several crashes earlier in the week resulted in medical treatment and criticism that the track was too fast. Hannah Campbell-Pegg, an Australian luger, likened the feeling of sliding on the track to being a “crash-test dummy,” adding, “I mean, this is our lives.” Yahoo Sports’ Dan Wetzel said her “words should haunt these games.” That’s just what these games need: to be haunted by an athlete’s death and another’s poor grammar.
Wetzel went further by suggesting the entire luge event be canceled until they can redesign the track, sounding as if he had an army of contractors and designers at his beck and call. Moreover, the tone in several of his columns concerning the incident is two notches below a state of panic. With his pleading to put everything on hold in favor of a complete overhaul of the sport, he cited the “recklessly arrogant” speeds of the sport relative to two decades previous.
Thankfully, the Vancouver Olympic Committee took action on the speed issue without succumbing to the near hysterics forwarded by Wetzel. They simply reduced the speed lugers could attain by moving the starting block down the mountain. Of course, this simple, logical solution of the track’s safety concerns wasn’t satisfactory for Wetzel, who couldn’t comprehend such a quick fix given to such a tragedy, as he blatantly stated the simple adjustments to keep the event on schedule were done solely to parlay the ensuing TV ratings generated by Kumaritashvili’s death.
Wetzel’s excessive alarm-raising following the crash is actually exemplar of a trend — or perhaps a symptom of it — brought to light a day before the incident on The Colbert Report. Colbert interviewed an art curator who detailed, by way of past games’ posters, the gradual dismantling of Olympic magnificence over the past century, implying it has been replaced by stiflingly vanilla, corporate-influenced graphical sterility. Go world, indeed.
It’s a good point. What happened to the guts and the glory? How has the iconic middle-finger-to-Hitler Owensian triumph, the retro-porn-suggesting, Spitzian machismo been replaced by the bong-smoking, $5-foot-long double-fisting, man-mutant Phelpsian goofiness? Where’s the political gravity surrounding the Miracle on Ice? Until recently, the greatest drama of the current games was the criticism of Sports Illustrated for our best skier bending over on the cover (speed tuck, anyone?). Post-crash, we were pushed to throw in the towel for an event that had yet to begin seemingly for the sake of throwing in the towel.
Now, I’m not trying to be in opposition of the athletes’ safety, but danger is the name of the game come Winter Olympics time. There’s a higher blade-per-capita rate in Vancouver now than there is in the San Quentin Prison yard. Luging equipment consists of a hard plastic boogie board sitting on two weapons-grade sabers, with riders’ only protection coming from high density foam strapped to their heads, not to mention egregiously thin full-body suits (aka luge-otards). Looking back on the clip of the crash, a quaint, if now tactless, quip comes to mind: It’s not the fall — or the speed of the luge — that kills you; it’s the sudden stop at the end. Food for thought: You’d think that in a country synonymous with hockey, surely somebody would have thought to put a sufficiently high, resilient, transparent barrier between the lugers and the columns that can so quickly end their lives.
Ryan Spencer is a psychology senior. His columns appear on Monday.
