Georgian athlete lost in Vancouver to be buried on February 20

Nodar Kumaritashvili, a sledge racer from Georgia, who perished on February 12 after an accident in the sledge-bobsleigh track at the Winter Olympiad in Vancouver, will be buried on Saturday, February 20, in Bakuriani.

The athlete crashed to death in the sledge track in the Canadian city of Whistler just a couple of hours before the opening ceremony of Winter Olympiad-2010. During a training run he failed to drive his sledge at the speed about 140 kilometres per hour, got out of the chute and hit a metal fence post. Later, Nodar Kumaritashvili died in hospital.

Today, it became known that Georgia opened a banking account named after Nodar Kumaritashvili to accumulate funds on development of the sledge sport. This was reported by the IA "News-Georgia" with reference to the Ministry of Culture, Protection of Monuments and Sports of Georgia. Donations are welcomed from individuals and legal entities.

Meanwhile, the International Sledge Federation (FIL - F?d?ration Internationale de Luge) and organizers of the Olympiad-2014 have agreed that the track to be built for Winter Games in Sochi will be slower than in the Canadian Whistler. According to the "Georgia Online", this decision was influenced by the death of Nodar Kumaritashvili.

In his turn, Udo Gurgel, designer of the Olympic sledge-bobsleigh track in Whistler, where Kumaritashvili died in a crash, said that he was shocked by the incident. "We've designed six Olympic tracks; and there was not a single case of someone's rushing out of it. The speed at finish should be about 120 km/h. In principle, everything should be under control," he said.

Meanwhile, the Organizing Committee of Winter Olympiad-2010 disseminated, already several hours after the tragedy, its statement running that the accident, which caused the death of the Georgian sledge racer Nodar Kumaritashvili, was a result of his own mistake, not of the defect of the sledge-bobsleigh track in Whistler.