#Sochi Safety Questions Linger After 2010 Luge Death Nodar Kumaritashvili

He died instantly. The IOC played hush-hush so his death wouldn't affect the television ratings.

The full run is here, with bloody photos.

At the New York Times, "A Swift and Fatal Luge Plunge, and Then an Abyss of Sorrow":

BAKURIANI, Georgia — To reach this tiny skiing village, carved into the north side of the Trialeti mountain range, one must weave through a long progression of switchbacks rising more than a mile above sea level. When it is snowing — which is often — the trip from the capital city of Tbilisi can take nearly three hours.

Dodo Kumaritashvili makes the journey back and forth almost every week. Her daughter has a baby girl, and so Dodo goes to Tbilisi to help take care of her granddaughter. Upon returning home one weekend recently, Dodo entered her house and called out, “I’m home, son.” Then she began cooking.

Dodo’s son, Nodar, has been dead for four years. But she makes food for him every day, usually fruit or cake or meat but never soup, not even on the coldest days. Her son hated soup. When she finishes cooking, she brings the food into her son’s room and sits among the photographs and trophies and posters on the walls. After a few hours, she clears the food away and gives it to children who live nearby....

Of the three Olympic sliding sports — luge, bobsled and skeleton — luge is generally considered the most dangerous. Riders lie back on their sleds and zoom down icy tracks while peering through the space between their feet. To steer, they shift the runners of the sled with their legs or shoulders.

Generally, speeds are 80 to 90 miles per hour. Crashes are not uncommon, but according to luge’s governing body, which is known by its French acronym, FIL, the crash rate for Whistler’s track was in line with other tracks around the world. In the three years before the 2010 Olympics, there were 203 crashes there over more than 30,000 runs in luge, bobsled and skeleton, FIL said.

Still, the track at Whistler was different. Speeds were higher among all riders and, at least anecdotally, the chance of a serious crash seemed greater. Armin Zoeggeler, the Italian legend who has won two Olympic gold medals, had a rare crash on the same day as Kumaritashvili’s accident. A female luger from Romania had a bad crash two days earlier and was knocked unconscious.

A year before the Olympics, when a luger set a world record of 95.65 m.p.h. at Whistler, Josef Fendt, the president of FIL, was blunt about his concern. “It makes me worry,” he said then....

According to the report, Kumaritashvili committed “driving errors” that led to his sled’s catapulting out of control. Generally, when a luge hits a wall, it either breaks or pushes the rider toward the opposite wall. In either situation, the rider stays inside the track. In Kumaritashvili’s case, however, he flew out of the track and slammed into a metal support pole. The cause of his death, according the coroner, was “multiple blunt force injuries” after a “collision with fixed structures.”