Killed Georgian Luger Showed Courage in Even Competing

by

Feb 14, 2010

Killed Georgian Luger Showed Courage in Even Competing It's not often that a luge story leads off the Olympic coverage here in the United States. Maybe that's because the American contingent isn't a traditional power on the luge track — U.S. sliders have just two silvers and two bronzes in Olympic history.

Or maybe it's because there's hasn't been an Olympic tragedy on this level in quite a long time.

"Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear." 
Ambrose Redmoon

Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvili died on Friday. He was 21 years old. His dad, David, was a luge star for the former Soviet Union and is now the president of the Georgian luge federation. His cousin? Georgia's Olympic luge coach.

Since he knew what his daddy did for a living, Nodar wanted to be an Olympian. He started training seriously back in 2003, and attended a training camp in Germany to further his career. He later trained in France and was ranked 44th in the world entering the Vancouver Games.

But despite seemingly being well qualified to compete in the Olympics, Kumaritashvili was worried about the Vancouver track.

"He called me before the Olympics … and he said, 'Dad, I'm scared of one of the turns,'" David said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal from his house on Sunday. David's wife, Nodar's mother, was sitting at a table full of photographs of her late son, crying.

"I said, 'Put your legs down on the ice to slow down,' but he said if he started the course he would finish it. … He was brave."

"Courage is being afraid but going on anyhow." 
Dan Rather

To even begin Friday's training run facing those kinds of concerns on the icy track of Blackcomb Mountain, 76 miles north of Vancouver, Kumaritashvili and others showed remarkable courage. 

See, questions already had been raised before about the safety of the Olympic track. Last week, a female Romanian luger was knocked unconscious and four Americans also had trouble negotiating the course's curves. Earlier in the day on Friday, two-time Olympic champion Armin Zoeggeler lost control, crashed and fell out of his sled before standing up and walking away relatively unscathed.

Yet Kumaritashvili took off on his fateful run. He went on anyhow.

And just before the end of his sixth practice run, hours away from walking into Vancouver's Olympic stadium with his comrades in the colors of his native country, a day before he was to compete in his first Olympics, his fears suddenly became well-founded.

Going nearly 90 mph, Kumaritashvili lost control of his sled in turn 16 of the course, nicknamed "Thunderbird," was launched out of his sled, through the air and slammed into an unpadded steel pole that lined the track.

Track officials and paramedics rushed to the scene, but they were unable to revive the unconscious Kumaritashvili. He was rushed to a local hospital where he was shortly thereafter pronounced dead.

The concerns about safety of the track were re-raised following the horrific crash. The international luge federation insisted that the track was safe, yet before the men's competition took place on Sunday, wooden boards were constructed to line the area where Kumaritashvili was killed. Also, the previously unpadded beams were padded. The starting points for both the men's and women's events were changed, making the tracks both shorter and quite a bit slower.

Some athletes complained, saying that it took away from the spirit and excitement of the competition. But they were wrong.

The spirit and excitement already had been stripped away.

"Courage is being scared to death … and saddling up anyway." 
John Wayne

Not sure if you caught NBC's feature on Kumaritashvili following Friday's accident, but the tiny mountain town in which he grew up, Bakuriani, might be best described as an adequate stand-in for Sacha Baron Cohen's fictional Kazakhstani hometown in Borat.

Obviously, though, there was nothing humorous about the town's reaction to the loss of one of its sporting heroes.

"He was ready for the Olympics; he was a real clean-living sportsman," said Bakuriani native and friend David Kukosuvili.

"He came from a sporting family, and he knew what he was doing," said Giorgi Avakyan, who runs a ski-rental stall in Bakuriani. "Everybody's crying. He was our lad."

Following Kumaritashvili's death, his Georgian luge teammate, Levan Gureshidze, withdrew from the Games. It's hard to blame him.

"What happened is just awful," said Lena Khachaturyan, who works in the pharmacy across from the high school Kumaritashvili attended. "Everybody in Bakuriani was so proud of Nodar, but in the end he died for his sport."

Blame whomever you want for the accident — the track, the weather, Kumaritashvili's relative lack of experience — but what's done is done. As it is, it's so frustrating, so utterly heartbreaking to hear of something like this unfolding. Kumaritashvili was so close to achieving his athletic goal and living his Olympic dream, but they were robbed from him at the last minute by a shocking and horrific accident.

But the fact is that Khachaturyan is right. He died competing in his sport. He died as an Olympian. He died as a courageous man who pushed ahead even when he was scared to do so.

To paraphrase William Wallace from Braveheart, "Everyone dies. But not everyone really lives."

I never knew him, but I'm guessing Nodar Kumaritashvili packed a lot of living into his 21 years.

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