It is wrong to have pillars that close to the track and Stephen Plate shows this to the rest of the world. ...
I think it is fine for pillars to be that close, on a track for a sport that is participated in voluntarily and with full knowledge that those pillars are there. All it would have taken is for the lugers to say "we aren't going down that course with those pillars there", if it were so clear that the pillars shouldn't have been there.
People train for years for the Olympics. I doubt that safety checks are on the top of their list when they finally get there. Does that mean they deserve to die?
Lugers can still die if they take a wall too high and capsize, smashing their heads into the solid ice track.
If you want to remove all means of death in the sport of luge, you might as well not luge at all. In fact, you won't be luging. You'll have to have a solid tube filled with soft water (instead of the open ice-caked half-tube). That's the "thrill ride" at a water park. How exciting. And someone could still drown if they aren't careful.
So we can't remove any risks (even obvious ones) because that leads to a slippery slope of killing the sport? Straw man, anyone?
How about solid concrete walls at most car race tracks?
They're in a goddamn car, designed so that the driver has a good chance of walking away from such a collision. The lugers are not. You're also forgetting that most of these walls have rows of tires in front to soften the blow (at least in the fastest races like Formula One).
Bugger off IOC and let the rest of the world see what is wrong so it can be prevented next time.
Next on NBC, the 2046 winter olympics. At 8PM, the US and Canada face off for the snowball fights, followed by the mackeral slapping contest between Great Britain and France. At 11PM, Greece and Latvia compete in 'walk around the block', and then Bolivia and Japan face off in a rematch of the famous 2042 "fill the slurpee cup as full as you can without spilling" contest. Stay tuned...
Great - another slippery slope straw man. Didn't you do that already?
