Track safer after Nodar Kumaritashvili death, but lugers unhappy

The superpipe gold is his to lose. Yet when he was first learning the trick that virtually guarantees him gold – the double cork – his hands shook with fear, he said.

Then at the X Games, he slammed his face into the side of the pipe during training, his head snapping back violently. The first thought that entered his mind: “I have to get back to the top and try it again,” he said.

It was not bravado, but self-preservation. He did not want to let any fear take root. “I’d be lying if I said that crash didn’t shake me up,” he said.

For American freestyle aerials skier Ryan St. Onge, the fear of not being able to perform is worse than the fear of injury. “Sometimes, if you take a crash really hard and you can get up and take another jump, that actually adds to your confidence,” he says.

To the average real estate agent, that might sound utterly absurd. But in the presence of these athletes, it eventually becomes apparent that the Winter Olympics are a unique mental and physical ecosystem.

To many Winter Olympians, it is not a matter of dealing with fear. The joy of the sport is interlinked with its danger. If downhill skiing were as dangerous as Parcheesi, after all, skiers might go race motorcycles.

“If you’re scared of speed, you can’t do downhill,” says American alpine skier Kailyn Richardson. “There has to be a little bit of craziness.”

Canadian slider Cockerline agreed. “That’s probably why I got into a sport like luge,” he said.

Speed vs. safety

Even after Kumaritashvili’s death, which resonates deeply in the tight-knit luge community, Cockerline acknowledged that moving the race to the women’s start “has taken a lot of the excitement out of it.”

“From the start to turn 11 there’s no speed,” added Austria's Manuel Pfister.

“I love speed,” he said, before adding: “But you have to think about the safety.”

His comments hint at the conflicting thoughts and emotions among lugers Saturday.

“My emotions are going from high to low, high to low,” said Cockerline. “One minute you’ve got tears in your eyes thinking about Nodar, and the next you’re psyching yourself up” for the race.

Coming back and sliding Saturday “says a lot about the luge community,” said Canada's Samuel Edney.

For Edney, the day had been particularly difficult. He had just gotten to know Kumaritashvili at the last World Cup race. “He was excited, thrilled to be coming to Vancouver,” Edney said.

“For me personally, I felt like I was sliding with Nodar today.”

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