Like so many winter sports fans this week, I’ve got Georgia on my mind.
The mountainous nation is, of course, the homeland of Nodar Kumaritashvili, the 21-year-old luge racer who died before our eyes on Day One of the 21st Olympic Winter Games in Vancouver. Olympic officials dedicated Friday’s opening ceremony to Nodar. I’m dedicating the entirety of the Winter Games.
I realize that my gesture is wholly symbolic, but to me, so is Kumaritashvili. He is symbolic of the hard-core nature of winter sport, of the bitter temperament and uncaring disposition of the often punishing pastimes we practice only when it’s cold enough to kill you.
The Winter Games are always dedicated to people such as Kumaritashvili, if not always by name.
There are those who attempt to spin the desperate housewives drama of figure skaters as most emblematic of the Winter Olympics. Perhaps it’s the pageantry of the opening ceremony that somehow blends with the only sport where the participants wear costumes. But lost somewhere in the evolution of figure skating is the fact that ice sliding originated as an outside sport, just like the ones that more suitably represent the Winter Games, at least in my mind.
Despite the slick packaging and Olympic production presented to the world every four years, the behind-the-scenes reality is that these games of winter are among the most raw sports ever invented. Just to practice, they demand ice, snow and often towering mountains that most folks are too scared to go near at any time of year. Wind and storms and freezing temperatures that “normal” people complain about are the elements that create playing fields where winter athletes go to have fun.
Consider all the sports — winter, summer, spring or fall — that a person can choose from and about the only thing nuttier than luge racing is doubles luge racing. Slap on a speed suit, sharpen the sled blades and sling yourself down an ice-covered elevator shaft doing 90 mph. Its participants are not like most of us.
And luge is hardly alone. The very nature of winter sports — skating, ski racing, ski jumping, snowboarding, bobsled — necessitates sharp tools with edges capable of carving ice as well as slicing arteries or severing appendages. Racers seek out slick, frozen surfaces to minimize friction and maximize speed. The skiers lining up to huck themselves off the 90-meter jump refer to that one as the “normal” hill.
Perhaps more fitting, the sliding track near Vancouver was nicknamed “The Beast.” And although an investigation attributed the accident to driver error, the unleashed Beast turned out to be a killer with at least one deadly design feature.
Invariably such tragedy invokes lopsided debate over safety in sport, the ageless and unanswerable questions of how fast is too fast, how much is too much. Who draws the line at the edge of risk, and more important, where?
There is, of course, no accurate ending point for such deliberation, at least not one that everyone agrees upon. Many luge sliders made it safely to the tail end of the Beast. One did not. But all it takes is a single person who believes he can cross an established threshold to reinvent that boundary. Isn’t that the distilled essence of sport, after all?
The true fault in the danger debate is the reality that these sports actually manage to become safer over time. Before Kumaritashvili’s death, there have been three deaths associated with the Winter Games, the last one occurring during a speed skiing demonstration in 1992. Australian skier Ross Milne died when he struck a tree during a training run before the 1964 Winter Games at Innsbruck. British luger Kazimierz Kay-Skrzypecki died in training the same year.
That’s more than 45 years between Olympic luge tragedies, despite increases in participation and markedly faster speeds. And let’s face it, this sport has had the ability to kill since it began. Just like the rest of them.
In recent years, we’ve watched downhill skier Lindsey Vonn airlifted off a mountain in Italy with a potential broken back. We’ve heard Picabo Street discuss the conscious decision to sacrifice her femur instead of her face during one of her bone-shattering crashes. We witnessed speed skater J.R. Celski nearly bleeding to death when he sliced open his leg with the blade of his own skate.
And we’ve seen all of them return to their sports. Not because of anything that made those sports any safer, but as Vonn says: “Because I’m a skier. That’s my identity.”
While I can’t hazard an attempt to explain the internal workings of a man who chooses to dedicate his life to becoming the world’s fastest sledder, I recognize that such people exist. And once every four years, they gather with like-minded clans from across the globe to share their passion and show the world just how courageous, competitive, and by most accounts crazy, they really are.
As a disciple of winter sports society, I can respect that sort of dedication. It’s just a shame this other kind of dedication comes at such a heavy cost.
