The fool who decide padding wasn't needed should be sued.... also, BUILD A SAFER TRACK....

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God bless his family

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"being a rock star is the intersection of who you are, and who you want to be." -Slash

It was a sad day, that's for sure. I don't know how his team mates were able to march in the opening ceremonies just hours later.

The thing is, these tracks have been getting faster every year because that's what the athletes want. They want to go faster, break new records, and bring home the gold.

What they did was change the start line to further down the mountain which is supposed to slow them down a bit.

Padding sounds like a good idea but hitting padded steel at 150K would still pretty much do you in.

Such a dangerous sport. So sad.

Gridlok

Something in this mind keeps saying, the original concept of the Olympics was to perform fairly straightforward athletic feats of skill. Running, jumping, throwing a javelin, relay racing, archery, wrestling.

And now, something about things like purpose-built artificial ultra high speed ice-tracks (e.g. luge) and doing aerial flips while wearing skis and throwing one's partner during figure skating...

...seem to be so far off the original point of things, as to make many modern, especially winter events seem rather ludicrous.

Danger is constant and the long lists of those injured, crippled, disfigured, paralyzed or killed during long pre-training and lead-up events must be heartbreaking.

That's very true, but it's not just Olympic sports. Look at what the poor football players go through. My God, it's a punishing game. And if you don't go and stick that guy with a potentially lethal hit, then the next guy will, and you'll be out of a job! The padding is better than it used to be but bodies haven't changed that much. (Don't think I'm against football - I love it.I'm just saying..)

That plus the difference between the best in the world and the loser that we forget in a week - is a few hundredths of a second. Yikes!!

Gridlok