We hear in the gospel this Sunday that when Jesus was led into the desert the devil tried to tempt him with promises of glory. This fortnight athletes from around the world compete for Olympic glory in Vancouver, Canada. Not all is triumph, however; before the Games opened, tragedy struck when a Georgian luger died during a training accident.

Twenty-one-year-old Nodar Kumaritashvili lost control of his luge on the final turn of the course, the world’s fastest, and slammed into a steel support at 90 miles per hour shortly before the opening of the Vancouver Winter Olympics.

Kumaritashvili had earlier called his father to say he was worried about the track. “He called me before the Olympics, three days ago, and he said, ‘Dad, I’m scared of one of the turns,’ ” said David Kumaritashvili in an interview at his house in the small mountain town of Bakuriani.

The International Luge Federation has blamed the crash on the luger and not on any “deficiencies in the track,” saying that Kumaritashvili “did not compensate properly to make the correct entrance” into the curve where he slid off the track at the Whistler Sliding Centre.

Despite those assertions, Olympic officials took unusual measures to slow the speeds, and they altered the run to keep lugers on the track should they crash. Josef Fendt, president of the luge federation, said that the track is safe but that it had turned out to be far faster than designers ever intended it to be.

Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili expressed annoyance at the luge federation for saying Kumaritashvili died because of human error and said a new luge track would be built in Bakuriani and named in his honor. “I don’t claim to know all the technical details,” Saakashvili said, “but one thing I know for sure: No sports mistake is supposed to lead to a death.”

An article by Samantha Shields for the Wall Street Journal