The physique of Nodar Kumaritashvili, the Georgian aspirant in the luge killed at the Vancouver Winter Olympics on Friday, will arrive behind in the icy mountainous country of Bakuriani today.
The coffin will be met by his lamentation father David, who yesterday spoke of his clarity of loss and incomprehension. He feared that curve, he said, holding higher a print of his passed son. I told him, You usually take a slower start. But he said: Dad, what kind of thing you are precision me? I have come to the Olympics to try to win.
The perilously thin line in in in in between annihilation and excellence is, of course, constituent to the extraordinary interest of what are well known as impassioned sports. Perhaps the adherents, rather similar to the French existentialists, feel that they are usually indeed vital when they are unequivocally close to dying. Indeed, Jean-Paul Sartre competence roughly have been articulate of luge racers when he wrote: What the artist adds to the board are the days of his life: the journey of living, hurtling towards death.
Many have attempted to placate the reserve concerns voiced in new days by receiving this thought to the dignified limits, arguing that genocide is, on occasion, destined when immature men and women propel themselves down giddy tubes of ice at speeds of some-more than 80mph. They point out that majority competitors have blamed the collision on motorist blunder and that the International Luge Federation has released a matter observant that it could not be blamed on an vulnerable track.
BACKGROUNDGhanaian on doubtful slant to OlympicsVancouver struggling to cover cost of GamesLuge rider"s family criticize genocide lane At last ... Canada set upon bullion at homeBut others sojourn deeply uneasy. If the lane was safe, since has the march been shortened to proceed at the womens proceed position, to illustrate shortening speeds around the shutting corners? If the precautions were ample, since has a temporary blockade been erected at the tip of dilemma 16? If the make up was blameless, since has the steel await stick opposite that Kumaritashvili cracked his skull been belatedly padded?
The deepest regard of all, however, relates to the right away barbarous Own the Podium programme. This was an try by the Canadian Olympic Committee to pledge the success of done at home athletes by muscle action home value to the max. In the light of the tragedy one aspect of the programme, in particular, has taken on sinister proportions namely, the preference to extent the entrance of unfamiliar athletes to the venues.
It has been reported that the run on that Kumaritashvili died was usually his 26th down the rocket-fast course, roughly half of that were from the womens or youth starting positions. His Canadian rivals, by contrast, had practised some-more than 300 times, giving them a far larger feel for the geometry of the ice.
The subject of either the grave review in to Kumaritashvilis genocide will apply to the miss of use opportunities could right away conclude what has turn one of the majority uneasy Games in Winter Olympic history.
But it is the material repairs to the Olympic transformation itself that will be of majority regard to the royal custodians at the International Olympic Committee. After all, even if the Own the Podium is not found to be obliged for Kumaritashvilis death, it but hints at usually how far the idea of Olympianism has morphed from the strange prophesy of Baron De Coubertin. The really actuality that an organising cabinet was rebuilt evenly to criticise the award prospects of abroad competitors even to the point of receiving risks with their reserve reveals the assume at the heart of the Olympic preferred and the pomposity of the Olympic Charter, with the speak of dignity, oneness and the agreeable growth of man.
Not that we should be terribly astounded by this. Even at the majority noble, the Olympics (as any aspirant could discuss it you) is about the office not of faith but of exposed individualism.
There was no oneness in in in in between Sebastian Coe and Steve Ovett, whose adversary at the Moscow Games of 1980 will shortly be done in to a underline film; no intercourse in in in in between Ben Johnson and Carl Lewis, whose baleful strife in 1988 could be pronounced to have ushered in the complicated Olympic era; no sisterly feeling in in in in between Dame Kelly Holmes and Maria Mutola as the former charged past, lungs ripping with ambition, to dispossess her precision partner of bullion and glory.
The Olympics have never voiced an reliable imperative, usually ever a greedy one. The Games are, to put it bluntly, implacably depraved and quintessentially Darwinian. Economists call it a zero-sum game: my success is synonymous with your failure, my happiness with your despair, my excellence with your ignominy. It is usually since the winners lectern has room for usually one chairman that the touchpaper of particular aspiration is lighted and since nations manoeuvre so feverishly to feat the promotion potential. War but the guns, as George Orwell once noted.
Not that there is anything wrong with this foe and hierarchy are, one suspects, essential aspects of the human condition. But that should not forestall us from exposing the delicately sanitised (and unusually lucrative) picture of the Olympics for what it is. Nor should it hold us behind from indicating out that when the ethos of winning at all costs is taken over the constraints of simple morality, the ramifications are not usually depressing, but potentially perilous.
