Luge start positions altered

Last Updated: Saturday, February 13, 2010 | 4:23 PM ET

By Signa Butler, CBC Sports

A memorial for Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvili was set up outside the Whistler Sliding Centre Friday. (Eric Foss/CBC)

The start of all Olympic luge competitions will be moved farther down the Whistler Sliding Centre track, international luge officials said Saturday.

Officials said the decisions to alter the start positions were made with the "emotional component" of athletes in mind following Friday's death of a Georgian competitor.

Men's sliders finished their training Saturday morning from what was the women's start ramp. Women's and doubles sliders will now compete even further down the track, from the junior start gate.

The men's competition begins at 5 p.m. PT with the first two of four runs. The medallists will be determined after the final two runs Sunday.

Nodar Kumaritashvili, a 21-year-old slider from Borjomi, Georgia, died Friday after he crashed in the final curve. He was travelling at nearly 140 km/h when he slammed into an unpadded steel support pole.

Before men's training resumed Saturday, course workers modified the last turn where Kumaritashvili crashed, erected a two-metre-high wooden wall to cover the exposed steel beams on the turn and scraped and shaped ice from the edges in the final turn.

New start positions will curb speed

By adjusting the start, the men will not be able to reach their top speeds, which have exceeded 150 km/h this week, and the vertical drop won't be as severe.

Concerns about the lightning-fast, technically difficult course had been raised for months. The $105-million sliding centre, on the southeast face of Blackcomb Mountain, has been billed as a wild ride. Kumaritashvili's crash happened at the track's fastest point, the 16th and final turn.

Before the changes, the 1,450-metre course has 16 turns and drops steeply for 152 metres, the longest drop of any track in the world. The average grade is about 11 per cent, including two stomach-inverting drops of 20 per cent.

The International Luge Federation and Vancouver Olympic officials said Friday night their investigation showed that the crash was the result of human error and there was "no indication that the accident was caused by deficiencies in the track."

In a joint statement, they said Kumaritashvili was late coming out of the next-to-last turn and failed to compensate.