The Side Line

A death will leave a black eye on these Winter Olympics, no matter how well the games play out for Vancouver. When Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritisvili sailed over the wall at the finish line of the Whistler Mountain luge track and collided with a steel girder at about 88 miles per hour, there was suddenly a tragedy to cope with just hours before the glory of the opening ceremony.

Why did this happen? The obvious response is the lack of safety on the track, but had anything like this happened before? No. No one could have predicted a luger coming completely out of the course, especially near the finish line, where he should have been traveling in a straight line and started braking to stop.

The combination of an inexperienced luger and a track that was described as “scary fast” and “insane” resulted in the unfortunate passing of a young man following his Olympic dreams.

Unfortunately, in the pursuit of perfection, some athletes either take unnecessary risks or are put into situations they are unprepared for. In Kumaritisvili’s case, both likely occurred. There is no way to know what was going through his head as he approached the final turn. I believe that as one of the least-experienced riders, he knew he had to take some chances to cut his time down. He just picked the wrong turn on the wrong track to take that chance.

The debate over the video of the crash being shown on the news is a hot one in the media, and with good reason. If it had been an accident with more detachment from the victim, I wouldn’t have an issue with it. However, the video clearly shows a helpless Kumaritisvili smashing into a steel pole at almost 90 miles per hour, and then an image of a paramedic administering CPR to his bloodied and crumpled body. That is nothing the national prime-time television audience needs to see, much less anything his family and friends could stumble across accidently.

For the sake of getting a breaking news story, I can understand the decision to a point. But I cannot condone the way our national media handled the situation.

Either way, what I can hope for as a sports fan and a sports journalist is a fantastic Olympics, a USA victory in the final medal count, and increased attention to details like safety in large-scale events like these winter games.

Posted by Preston Sellers on Feb 19 2010. Filed under Sports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry