Does anyone else find the luge accident on the Vancouver Olympics really disturbing ?
What I find most disturbing is how preventable this tragedy was. The solution is not a “layer of pad around the poles” as many are suggesting. At nearly 90 miles per hour, severe injuries are still inevitable. The real solution would be to enclose the riskier portions of the luge slide (or maybe the entire course) with a transparent and rounded plastic/plexiglass top so that it would be impossible to slide out in the first place, and there wouldn’t be a risk of high-speed impacts. The cost of this solution is a lot lower than the cost of human life, or the cost of the PR burden the Olympics is facing now. Sadly, I think we haven’t seen my proposed safety measure implemented because part of the entertainment value of the luge is how risky it is.
