A second major international sports event in rapid succession has been disfigured by death.

At first glance, there seems nothing whatever in common between the attack on the Togo football bus in Angola and Nodar Kumaritashvili’s terrible accident at the Whistler Sliding Centre yesterday.

Both incidents, though, raised many immediate questions:

Why were the Togo squad travelling by bus through a volatile region? Should the walls at the exit of curve 16 have been higher to begin with? And what about that metal pillar?

They also, frankly, illustrate what sports authorities are up against in an age when athletes routinely strive for every last ounce of competitive advantage in what are often dangerous pursuits and sports events are more than ever potential targets for those with political grievances.

On the one hand, we, the sporting public, expect powers-that-be to deliver exciting spectacles in a carefree, party atmosphere; on the other, woe betide them if they let their guard slip.

The two incidents have also highlighted how profoundly the deaths of athletes or members of their immediate entourage nowadays resonate, even in a world in which tens of lives can be ended in an instant by a train crash or suicide bomber, tens of thousands by an earthquake or tsunami.

I am old enough to remember when death, though still shocking, was almost taken for granted as what the French call a "fatalité", an almost inevitable consequence of taking part in certain sports.

Jim Clark, Jochen Rindt, Gilles Villeneuve, François Cevert, Ronnie Peterson…The litany of motor-racing drivers who met untimely ends in the 1960s, 70s and 80s seems staggering today.

At the time I thought of it as very sad, but something that came with the territory.

With digital media now facilitating saturation coverage of even comparatively minor sports events, I think the impact of athletes’ deaths, on the mercifully rare occasions when they do occur, is going to intensify further.

It is getting easier all the time, via proliferating social media, for fans all over the world to kid themselves that they are involved in a personal relationship with their heroines and heroes.

Vancouver has been referred to more than once as the first Twitter Olympics.

Well, imagine if poor Kumaritashvili had been one of the growing number of athletes who have taken to ‘tweeting’ their every move.

The sports industry now owes it to the Georgian luge athlete to make sure that he did not die in vain.

And that means doing more than flying flags at half-mast during the Vancouver opening ceremony.



Kumaritashvili, of course, came from a nation in a frequently troubled part of the world - the Caucasus.

It is a country that, moreover, was involved in clashes with Russia, its giant neighbour, the last time the Olympic ‘family’ gathered for the Games in Beijing in 2008.

Russia, in turn, is in a special position at these Vancouver Games, since it will host the next Winter Olympics in 2014 in the Black Sea resort of Sochi, maybe 50 kilometres up the coast from the border with Abkhazia.

I think Russia should make what would be a potentially far-reaching reconciliatory gesture by announcing forthwith that the luge venue to be used in the 2014 Winter Olympics will be named the Nodar Kumaritashvili track.

How about it Dmitry?

David Owen is a specialist sports journalist who worked for 20 years for the Financial Times in the United States, Canada, France and the UK. He ended his FT career as sports editor after the 2006 World Cup and is now freelancing, including covering last year's Beijing Olympics. An archive of Owen’s material may be found by Twitter users at www.twitter.com/dodo938