VANCOUVER -- The head of the 2010 Winter Olympics raised the possibility of a serious accident "or worse" on the luge track almost a year before a Georgian luger died.
After 21-year-old Nodar Kumaritashvili was killed during a training run on the Whistler track, John Furlong often repeated that such an incident was beyond his imagination.
"It's not something I am prepared for, or anything I ever thought I would need to prepare for," he told the media the day of the accident, which was also the first day of the Games.
But in an e-mail dated March 2009, Furlong raised the spectre that something could happen.
The emails were released Monday by Vancouver Olympic Committee spokeswoman Renee Smith Valade and are in response to a letter from the International Luge Federation (FIL) letter to the track's German designer.
They were first uncovered by the CBC via an Access to Information request.
The letter from FIL raises concerns about blistering practice times on the track but focuses on finding out what's being done to ensure the track for the 2014 Olympics in Russia won't be built the same way.
Still, the letter created confusion among Vancouver organizers as to whether they should be doing something to change the Whistler track.
"Imbedded in this note (cryptic as it may be) is a warning that the track is in their view too fast and someone could get badly hurt," Furlong writes.
"An athlete gets badly injured or worse and I think the case could be made we were warned and did nothing."
But organizers concluded that since FIL hadn't told them to make changes, they didn't need to.
Craig Lehto, who ran the Whistler Sliding Centre during the Games, said the dangerous nature of the sport was always on everybody's mind.
"The sliding sports are very, very fast so at any time I think you're always on that aspect of trying to do the very best you can and that you've done what these (International Federations) have asked you do," he said in an interview Monday.
"You can't eliminate it from your mind, ever."
But the reality was, Lehto said, it was not the Vancouver committee's job to devise track specifications but up to the federations.
"They are the experts in these fields," he said.
In Furlong's new memoir, due to be released on the one-year anniversary of the Games, he spends considerable time dealing with the aftermath of Kumaritashvili's death.
He recounted how, upon learning of the young man's death, he felt like he lost a son.
In all the crisis scenarios devised around the Games, Furlong wrote, "never in our wildest dreams did we imagine the death of an athlete op opening day."
Furlong revealed in the book that the young luger's family received a $150,000 insurance payout from the organizing committee.
But he also delivered $25,000 in cash to the family himself when he attended a memorial service in Georgia.
"Their son had not been out of my thoughts since that tragic Friday," Furlong wrote.
"To visit his family would be healing for me as well."
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