A few olympic thoughts

The Vancouver Olympic games are beyond the halfway stage, and although there have been enjoyable moments, too much went wrong to call them a success.

It all started with the unfortunate death of the Georgian luger which immediately raised safety issues. It is doubtful whether padding at the exit of the superfast and dangerous turn could have saved his life but the fact is, the pillars were unprotected - which was later changed.

Both men's and women's downhills were not without incidents. A worker on the course while the racer was speeding down could have resulted in a disaster but at least this time there were no consequences. Anja Paerson's spectacular tumble off the final jump also ended without serious injuries and she went on to win bronze in the combined event the following day.

Which can't be said about Petra Majdič's accident in the warm-up to the cross country classic sprint in which she was favourite for gold. She slipped on an ice plate in a sharp bend (which, by the way, was her fault) and dropped off course almost 3 metres into an unprotected (!) ditch, sustaining serious injuries. How she was able to compete at all with 4 broken ribs and a developing pneumothorax is incredible but to force herself to bronze with such injuries is no short of a miracle. Irony of all ironies - the technical delegate for this particular race was Slovenian. Later on, the organisers protected the dangerous parts of the cross country tracks.

There was a number of other incidents which were not life-threatening but no less annoying, like the officials letting the competitors start too early or too late in both biathlon pursuit races, or biased judging in men's figure skating favouring Evan Lysacek, thus robbing Yevgeny Plushenko of a deserved gold (I know my American friends may disagree on this one), to name but the most obvious few.

Still, I hope the true Olympic spirit prevails until the end and there will be no more incidents to further mar the games.