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.”
