With the head of the Winter Games helping carry the coffin to the hearse Nodar Kumaritashvili, the Georgian luger killed in a horrific crash in Vancouver on Friday, began his long, final journey home yesterday.

The body of the 21-year-old was flown to Germany after a candlelit memorial service during which members of the Georgian Olympic delegation filed past to touch their fallen team-mate.

Kumaritashvili’s body is to arrive in Bakuriani tomorrow, a small ski resort of about 1,500 people that has been plunged into mourning. It is to be met by Patriarch Ilia II, Georgia’s spiritual leader. “For every family in the village it’s a tragedy,” said Ramaz Goglidze, a senior Georgian Olympic official. “Even people who never met him cry all day. Everyone.”

Three Georgian athletes, including the figure skater Otar Japaridze, attended the memorial, filing past the open brown coffin. Kumaritashvili’s uncle and coach, Felix, broke down in tears.

John Furlong, Vancouver’s organising committee head, was one of 10 people who carried the coffin out of the building and placed it in the back of the grey hearse. “There were no speeches,” said the European Olympic Committees president Patrick Hickey. “People had their own private moment, reflecting on the situation. Everyone was so unified standing around sharing in the sorrow.”

Kumaritashvili died hours before the opening ceremony, when he lost control of his sled during a training run on the lightning-fast track in Whistler and slammed into a unpadded track-side steel pole.

An official from the International Luge Federation said he had met with Russian organisers and is confident a slower track would be constructed for the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi, Russia.

The track is “still going to be high speed, but it is going to be lower [shorter]“, the secretary general Svein Romstad told Associated Press.

In Vancouver, lugers are now starting lower down the course too and padding now covers the steel girders that remain exposed beyond a wooden wall erected at the curve where Kumaritashvili flew off his sled.

His death is still under investigation by the provincial coroner’s office. An autopsy was performed but the results will be provided to the family only, with a public report due in about two months.

After recommendations by medical and legal experts, the chief coroner of British Columbia will then decide whether to hold an inquest.

Kumaritashvili’s father told AP yesterday that his son worried the Whistler track – the fastest in the world – was too dangerous. “He told me: I will either win or die,” David Kumaritashvili said. “But that was youthful bravado, he couldn’t be seriously talking about death.”

Neuner’s gold medal in Tuesday’s 10km pursuit was the Germany team’s 15th in Olympic Winter Games history and their 40th overall.

Germany has won at least one medal in the individual event every year since biathlon was added to the women’s Olympic program in 1992 and are expected to be amongst the medallists in the women’s 15km individual event.

Neuner, the defending World Cup 15km champion, will start as favourite alongside Sweden’s Helena Jonsson and Anna Carin Olofsson-Zidek who are first and second in the overall World Cup rankings.

There is plenty of experience amongst the rest of the Germans with Andrea Henkel, the gold medallist in 2002, looking to repeat her success from Salt Lake City.

And Kati Wilhem, a master sargeant in the German army, is the defending World champion in the event and looking for her fourth Olympic gold medal.

But they could all be beaten by Simone Hauswald, who has good memories of the course here having won the 15km event at the test event held at Whistler Olympic Park in March 2009.

Tora Berger of Norway will be one to watch as well as she is one of the most consistent competitors.

Only one non-European biathlete – Canada’s Myriam Bedard in 1994 at Lillehammer – has won a biathlon medal and that does not look like changing in Whistler.

The athletes start at 30 second intervals and between loops of a cross-country circuit, each racer will stop four times to take five shots at a target 50 meters away, twice each in the prone and standing positions.

In the individual event, the penalty for a miss is one additional minute which is added to the biathletes time and the winner has the fastest overall time.

The Olympics have been blighted by weather woes that have forced delays to key events and the cancellation of thousands of tickets for snowboard and freestyle skiing due to safety issues for spectators.

Friday’s opening ceremony was overshadowed by the death of Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvili, which led to criticism of track safety.

Even the location of the Olympic flame in downtown Vancouver – behind a fence – has been a source of controversy.

But organisers said they are shocked by the ferocity of the criticism and believe it is not giving a true picture of the Games.

“Yes, it shocks me a lot because our assessment is that the competitions are excellent, the athletes are very satisfied,” said Renee Smith-Valade, spokeswoman for organising committee VANOC.

“We can’t do anything about the weather, all we can do is react properly to it.

“In our view, the reactions we are getting from spectators here and on television are that the Games are excellent, that Canadians are proud and that the Games are a great success.”

She said that challenges for the hosts of Winter Games were nothing new and that organisers of the 1988 Calgary Olympics were forced to postpone dozens of events because of warm weather.

“There’s no question we’ve seen some press in Britain that we would look at and wonder which city the reporter’s reporting from,” Smith-Valade said.

“It doesn’t feel like it’s here because we’re seeing people out on the streets celebrating.”

International Olympic Committee spokesman Mark Adams praised the Games, saying the IOC was “impressed and continue to be impressed by the level of organisation. It’s been a very well-organised Games”.

“What I read in the British papers bears absolutely no relation to what I’ve been seeing in these Games,” he added, saying that previous Games had also been hit with problems, with thousands of tickets cancelled at Nagano in 1998, for example.