Just finished watching the Men’s Moguls. Congratulations on the first winter gold won on home soil! Well done!
Redwolf
Bah, humbug. Now that we’ve killed a man by trying to game the luge track, I’m not sure we deserve it - at least not as a ‘national’ medal. I’m sure the skier deserved his medal, but the COC (Can. Olympic Committee) should keep its head down.
Simon, are you implying that the COC designed or tacitly approved the design of a luge track that they knew to be too difficult, too fast, and inherently unsafe for all but the most experienced participants in the event? The only thing that I fault them for at this point is the lack of foresight in not padding hard surfaces at potentially harzardous turns. A good safely engineer should have insisted on that.
I don’t think they thought it was unsafe, but they definitely did deliberately design a unique track. It’s the steepest (& hence fastest) luge track ever built. The IOC’s rules state that all competitors must receive a specified number practice runs on the Olympic track, but the Canadian luge team deliberately restricted the opposition to a little bit than the required minimum, while making sure that the Canadian luge team had much, much more access. They’ve been practicing on that track for months. The idea was to ensure that the Canadian luge team were the only competitors with extensive experience on a track that steep.
They were pretty blunt about this, if you read some of the local coverage. The moment the announcement was made that the race would start at the lower gate, one Canadian luger declared bitterly that this had just wiped out their advantage, and now the germans were going to win it. Which is exactly what happened. Not only did the track end up as the kind that the European lugers like, but the Canadian team has been training all seaon for another kind of race. Losing damn well serves them right, because the position they ended up in (not familiar enough with the track and the speed) was exactly the result they were trying to engineer for everyone else.
Haven’t they been limiting ice time to foreign skaters too? (or at least tried)
Maybe, but I don’t think that’s as heinous. Flat ice here isn’t all that different from flat ice anywhere. The COC is correct when they observe that all host nations do a fair amount of this.