Georgia: Olympic Luger Nodar Kumaritashvili's Hometown Mourns His Death

Not long after Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvili's fatal February 12 accident at the Vancouver Winter Olympics, a crowd started to gather outside his parents' small house in the Georgian mountain town of Bakuriani. Hours went by, but nobody dared to wake Kumaritashvili's parents and tell them that their 21-year-old son's first Olympic competition had proven to be his last.

"I walked out and saw people gathered. I saw their faces, and I knew my boy was gone," said Kumaritashvili's father, Davit Kumaritashvili, a seasoned luger who won several USSR youth championships when Georgia was part of the Soviet Union. His brother, Felix, coached the Georgian luge team and witnessed Nodar's death.

"We are all about sports in this family. Nodar also loved sports. He loved speed," a stone-faced Kumaritashvili recounted as neighbors took turns to offer their condolences.

The elder Kumaritashvili had taken his phone off the hook, and thanked visitors absent-mindedly. "Even Misha called," he said referring to Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili. I asked him to help me bring my son back as soon as possible."

Nodar Kumaritashvili's funeral date has been set for February 20, Interpress News reported, citing a government official. A plane bearing his body will return to Georgia on February 17, local news outlets reported. The government has paid for all transportation costs.

That homecoming, though, will do little to dispel local grief over a life lost too soon.

Everybody in the tight-knit community of Bakuriani knew Nodar Kumaritashvili and his dream to win at the Olympics.

"He would always come by my cafe and speak about the Olympics, said one café manager as she trudged up a snowy road, arm-in-arm with an older woman.

"That kid died living his dream," her companion agreed. But he should not have died like this and his poor mother should not have seen this, she added after a pause."

Kumaritashvili began luge sliding when he was 13, his father and relatives say. Like many in the ski resort of Bakuriani, a former contender for the 2014 Winter Olympics some three-and-a-half hours west of Tbilisi, he was fascinated by winter sports and good at them. He grew up in a house within easy reach of ski lifts and ski runs cutting through pine and fir slopes reaching to altitudes of 2,200 meters.

Kumaritashvili trained at different locations in Europe since Bakuriani does not have a professional sled track. The day before the crash, he phoned his mother by Internet to say that he was not sure about the track in Vancouver, where several other lugers had already wrecked.

"He dreaded that last curve," Davit Kumaritashvili said, sitting in his dimly lit living room, where candles shed light on a cluster of icons in the corner. "He's trained at several places in Europe, but he said this was the toughest run. I told him that he should try to slow down -- you do that by touching the surface with your feet -- but he said: You can't tell me that. You are an athlete. You know what this is like. Athletes do not tell each other to slow down."

Although changes were later made to the Whistler track to reduce the risk of accidents, Olympics officials initially blamed the young man's own error for his fatal crash. Their verdict, though cushioned by condolences, has vexed many in Georgia. President Saakashvili, who attended the Games opening, lashed out at the statement, saying that no sports mistake is supposed to lead to a death.

The athlete's father agrees, calling the officials' accusations unfair.

"I understand that we all take a certain risk when we pursue this sport, but when you know the risk is high, you take precautions, you raise walls and most definitely you don't place metal bars along the riskiest part of the run to make sure that a luger, who happens to jump out of the track, does not crash into it," Kumaritashvili said dryly.

Kumaritashvili's friends have urged him to press on with his accusations, but the elder luger says he does not want to pick a fight with anyone. "It is not going to bring my boy back," he said with a gesture.

Kumaritashvili has refused to watch television coverage of the accident, and takes issue with replays of the crash. His mother should not be shown how her son dies, he said.

The mother of Georgia's other Olympic luger, Inesa Gureshidze, shares that concern. Gureshidze, who described her son, Levan Gureshidze as Nodar Kumaritashvili's best friend, said that her son has struggled to cope with Kumaritashvili's death.

"You could not tear them apart," she recalled. "They went to school together, they hung out together, they raced together. And he died before his eyes."

Gureshidze withdrew from the luge competition after his friend's death.

"Many tell me now that he should've continued and pulled it off in Nodar's honor," said Inesa Gureshidze, who runs a convenience store near Bakuriani's tiny railway station. "But for us Georgians, friendship means more than anything, more than sports and fame. He could not race with the image of a dying Nodar in his head."

Back in the Kumaritashvilis living room, the athlete's distraught mother, dressed in black, sat by a coffee table strewn with her son's photos. In keeping with Georgian custom, she must choose one for his burial. She pondered, and then made her choice -- a shot of Nodar standing in front of the Olympic rings.