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The International Luge Federation (FIL) has decided that it wants tracks to be slower, de-emphasizing their speed, the group’s head, Svein Romstad, has told journalists, suggesting that the track for the 2014 Winter Games in Russia should be slower than the one at Whistler in Canada, where 21-year-old Nodar Kumaritashvili died in a training crash. The young man’s father, who was once a top luge competitor, is quoted by journalists as saying Monday that his son spoke to him of his fears about the speed of the track just days before he died.

More than a year earlier the FIL president, Josef Fendt, said the organization was starting to consider speed limits, something that had never been an issue before the world’s fastest track was opened and tested at Whistler. “The topic ‘speed limit’ in luge came up during the international training week at the Whistler Sliding Center carried out on the luge track for the 2010 Olympic Winter Games in Vancouver, Canada, in November,’ reported the FIL web site in December 2008. “Top speeds of up to 149 km/h were registered on the new track. ‘This is not in the interest of our International Luge Federation and it makes me worry’, said Fendt, who criticised the designers of the new Olympic track: “We’ve always assumed that, on principle, top speeds of 135 or 136 km/h were possible. But we didn’t reckon with such a leap.”

Links to other sites: BBC, FIL 2008, Time

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