Safety issues in Vancouver

The winter olympics is one of the biggest sports event in our society today where different nations from different continents gather up in one place and compete. The best athletes from each country competes in different events, and it makes the crowd get excited and entertaining just by watching them. I looked forward to the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics, and I expected a great Olympic.

However, things did not turn out as it should have been. Before the Olympic started, there were final practices going on at the Luge court (Luge is a sport where the athletes come down a downhill course while laying down on a sleigh). Everything seemed to be fine until a terrible accident occured. An athlete named Nodar Muaritashvili from Georgia fell off from the sleigh while he was entering the final curve in the course and collided with a metal post. He was moved to hospital immediately, but unfortunately, his damage was to severe that he was not able to survive the accident.

When I first saw the news from the internet that an accident occured in Vancouver, and an athlete died while practicing, I was totally shocked. I was surprised that such an accident could happen in such a big event like the winter olympics. It was said on the news that if there was safety equipments on the post, Nodar would have been able to survive. I wondered why there weren't anything around the posts to prevent such a tragedy. A Rumanian athlete had an accident occured before Muaritashvili and was injured, but there were no changes made to the course to prevent such accidents.

The Luge course in Vancouver is known as the fastest tracks in the world, and the fact that there were no safety equipments in the course made me feel angry. Luge is a dangerous sport itself, and there should have been protection before any of the practices or the matches were held. I hope that in further Olympics, there were no accidents like this to ever happen again.