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Killer track must be altered: designer

Candles are lit below the Olympic rings in a makeshift vigil for Nodar Kumaritashvili © Getty Images

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• News: Georgian team to stay in honour of Kumaritashvili
  

The designer of the Olympic luge track on which Georgian competitor Nodar Kumaritashvili died tragically in a training accident on Friday has admitted that changes must be made to ensure the safety of other competitors.

The opening round of the luge competition, scheduled for Saturday, has been suspended while organisers contemplate what modifications, if any, can be made to make safe a course that athletes have warned is too dangerous due its boundary-pushing speeds.

One competitor spoke of feeling like a "crash-test dummy" on the day before the accident, while a number of sliders vastly more experienced than 21-year-old Kumaritashvili have suffered crashes during preparation.

Canadian officials have been put in the spotlight after restricting track-time for foreign competitors in recent months to give their own athletes an advantage. The track's chief designer, Udo Gurgel, admits that changes must be considered if competition is to proceed as planned.

"This is terrible and shocking news," he told the online edition of German sports daily Sport Bild. "We have developed six Olympic tracks and nobody ever came off the course. We now have to consider how we can alter the piste. At the exit area we could increase the height of the walls by some 40 to 50 centimetres."

"The speed going into the finish line is less than 120km/h so every sled really ought to be controllable," Gurgel said. "(Kumaritashvili) must have shot round the curve like a bullet."

Kumaritashvili's death, which came after he shot off the course and slammed into a metal column at more than 145 kilometres per hour, came a day after Australian luger Hannah Campbell-Pegg warned that the track had crossed the line of safety.

"I think they are pushing it a little too much," she said on Thursday. "To what extent are we just little lemmings that they just throw down a track and we're crash-test dummies? I mean, this is our lives."

Georgia's small team have decided to stay on and compete in Vancouver, with Nikolos Rurua, Georgia's minister of culture, saying: "Our athletes decided to be loyal to the spirit of the Olympic Games and they will compete and dedicate their performance to their fallen comrade."

They wore black armbands and scarves to the opening ceremony on Friday night in honour of Kumaritashvili, and they received a standing ovation from the crowd as they entered the BC Place arena. The Olympic flag was lowered to half mast earlier in the day, and IOC President Jacques Rogge paid tribute to Kumaritashvili in his ceremonial address.

"It is with great sadness that we acknowledge the tragic loss of Nodar Kumaritashvili of the Georgian team, who passed away this morning in a training accident on the luge track," Rogge said.

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