Death at the Hands of the Olympics

A paper I just finished for my Magic, Witchcraft, and Modernity Class.

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A romantic Greco-Roman memory revived – a prodigious festival with pagan roots, found life breathed back into it more than a century ago. Initially, this rebirth was conceived as an attempt to unify the five civilized continents while also stressing the importance of athleticism not only in the life of the individual, but in that of the respective nations as well. The reawakening of the Olympic Games was in 1896. It was perhaps the first form of an international society bridging countries and continents. The irony commences at the very beginning, however. How are attempts at unity attained through competition? How are cultural differences, which can lead to unfair advantages, to be dealt with? When calamity and disaster strike, who bears responsibility?

The irony results in a grotesque spectacle of pageantry, in which nations spend their limited resources not to improve their own country, but to inflate themselves to prove worthiness to a skeptical audience of global citizens. Masks of unity are donned by the global community, and a theatrical and overblown production ensues. When these attempts at grandeur become so colossal and extravagant, it is almost impossible to avoid casualties. The Olympic Games employ an ancient formula to help shape modernity and keep it moving forward at an exponential pace. This is accomplished by new courses being engineered, increasing difficulty and speed, new sports being added with their own specific and enhanced dangers, and overblown, garish ceremonies that shock and awe, all while causing us to forget to search for the meaning beneath them. And here presents another irony: does not the word “ceremony” itself imply meaning?

These stale and vacant ceremonies can maintain a state of meaninglessness without it being problematic. However, when unexpected tragedy occurs, these contrived rituals and ceremonies are completely unequipped to deal with them. So, what happens when a casualty occurs? How does the Olympic Committee present the case to the world? How are we to perceive the accident? Can an ancient ceremony accommodate tragedy at the expense of global unity and modernity? Do the ghosts haunt the games, or do they get lost amongst the grandeur of the spectacle? Do these public displays of death displace death’s nature of being both sacred and taboo?
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On a February 12th practice luge run, twenty-one-year-old Nodar Kumaritashvili from the Republic of Georgia lost his life on a practice run down the fastest and most treacherous luge course in the world. His body spiraled off the track, out of control, limbs flailing, over the side of the track’s icy wall, only to collide with an exposed steel pole. He died. Almost instantly, the initial shock and tragedy of the event was transformed into myth and spectacle. It had to have been so for the parade of games to continue. Kumaritashvili’s ghost became a bloodstain on the Olympic flag. It became shameful and unforgiveable. It had to be transformed and made more tangible, less horrid. It had to become profane and no longer disturbingly engrained in the consciousness of the world. It had to become ordinary.

The world paused for a moment, scarcely even long enough to skip a beat. The opening ceremony was held, and after Georgia’s initial instinct of withdrawing from the games, they marched on. They attended the grand opening ceremony with black bands around their arms, with a space left in the procession in his place. But what was in this space? Was it occupied by some spectral being? Was it a memory? Was it a reminder of the dangers of modernity, of the dangers of speed, of the boundaries of mortality? The heads of the Georgian team members hung low as they entered the world’s stage, and they nodded, solemnly, while receiving a standing ovation and an explosion of applause from a full stadium of hungry, restless, and eager bodies making noise, waving flags, for the memory of an Olympian of whom most would have taken no notice if his life had not been cut so prematurely short.

For days, the footage of his death was projected onto the world’s consciousness like a horrifying, repressed memory that surfaced both instantly and unexpectedly. It was startling and unbearable. It was graphic and profound. To make it more digestible to a world of human beings who feel, the meaning must be lost, the tragedy must be manipulated. It must be molded into something new. The story of death must become a rumor that is simultaneously anonymous, public, and present. This untimely death must be incorporated into the everyday lexicon of the confused masses. It must achieve a sense of casualness, no matter how contrived, to be metabolized by the global community.

Through the footage of Kumaritashvili’s death, the magic that was so long ago lost in the capturing of images through film, once again regained its mystery. Moving pictures captured his body and treated it as an unknown phenomenon. It made “himself the factotum of his body” (Benjamin 90). The horrifying event was slowed down, zoomed in, blown up, disassociated, and distorted. It became tactile when “enlarged and capable of formulation, [it made] the difference between technology and magic visible as a thoroughly historical variable” (Benjamin). Videos of his death are littered all over the internet like discarded trash, and the term “dead luger” brings forth instant recognition, while his name more often does not.

This tactility became a “habitual knowledge, a sort of technological or secular magic [that is] brought into being and sustained… by a process of demystification and reenchantment” (Taussig 150). It provided a “crucial part of a more exact relation to the objective world, and thus it could not but problematize consciousness of that world, while at the same time intermingling fantasy and hope, as in dream, with waking life” (Taussig 150). His long, foreign name was disregarded entirely. He became faceless, nameless, recognized only when spiraling through the air, out of control, to his death through collision. His death became infamous; a tragic accident where blame hangs like an ominous black cloud over a confused world, while his identity is ignored.

The modern tragedy of Kumaritashvili’s death sharply defined and disclosed mortality within a seemingly eternal tradition of the Olympic Games. It explicitly displayed a lack of power over nature, over gravity, over the inevitable forces that modernity strives to conquer. Kumaritashvili’s departure was yet another example of the futility of this attempt to overcome the forces of the natural world, further proving that “technology is not the mastery of nature, but of the relation between nature and man” (Benjamin 93). The technology of the luge course at the Olympics, and the danger of its speed, was a violation of this law. There is also issue with the fact that “the high-stakes game of travelling at terminal velocity leaves little room for error” (Hainsworth). It was heathenism: attempting the “mastery of nature.”

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“Stories diversify, rumors totalize … stories are becoming private and sink into the secluded places in neighborhoods, families, or individuals, while the rumors propagated by the media cover everything and, gathered under the figure of the City, the masterword of an anonymous law, the substitute for all proper names, they wipe out or combat any superstitions guilty of still resisting the figure” (De Certeau 107-108).

Even with Kumaritashvili’s death “redefined,” or perhaps “undefined,” not all the world was convinced of this transformation of meaning, especially those close to him, who were deeply and profoundly affected by their loss. News teams traveled to his parents’ stark and modest cinderblock home in in Bakuriani, Georgia, intruding on their mourning and exploiting their sadness and loss. Despite the impact of this irreversible catastrophe, Kumaritashvili’s father maintained calmness and reason. He expressed disgust at the constantly replayed and infamous footage of his son’s death. He refused to watch it, stating that, a “mother should not be shown how her son dies.” The other Georgian Olympian luger, Levan Gureshidze, who was in fact Kumaritashvili’s best friend, withdrew from the Olympic luging competition. Gureshidze’s mother said that, “he could not race with the image of a dying Nodar in his head." Kumaritashvili’s mother sat, woeful in her home, staring at photos of her son spread over the coffee table. In Georgian tradition, she must choose one for display at the funeral, and she chose one of her twenty-one-year-old son standing in front of the Olympic flag.

The most basic problem with the attempted glossing over of Nodar Kumaritashvili’s death is the fact that it is impossible to do so effectively. We may no longer be shocked and horrified when we watch his body thrown from the track by force of velocity, gravity, and speed, but no matter how acquainted with this image of death we become, it will never cease to be alive for us. Because this death was at the hands of the global community, eternally etched on the collective unconscious, it cannot be erased. Similarly to Michael Taussig’s musings on public hangings and the implications of death at the hands of the state in “The Language of Flowers,” this “death at the hands of the global community” and “death at the hands of technology,” receives a publicity that exempts it from governmental and societal laws that would bind its meaning. Nodar Kumaritashvili’s death is also freed from the bounds of “death at the hands of nature” because of its tactile status achieved from immortality through media and publicity. It is captured on film for eternity. Because there was meaning there, it can never be lost. It becomes one of the “stories and legends that haunt urban space like superfluous or additional inhabitants” (De Certeau 106).



Sources & Footnotes

Benjamin, Walter. One Way Street. 1928. 61-94. Print.
"Brief History of the Olympic Games." Hellenic Information Society (UK). NOSTOS, Web. 23 Feb 2010. .
Bondy, Filip, and Nathaniel Vinton. "Olympic luger Nodar Kumaritashvili from Georgia is killed after horrific training crash." Daily News (2010): n. pag. Web. 24 Feb 2010. .

De Certeau, Michel. Walking in the City from The Practice of Everyday Life. 1986. 91-110.

Lomsadze, Giorgi. "GEORGIA: OLYMPIC LUGER NODAR KUMARITASHVILI’S HOMETOWN MOURNS HIS DEATH" Eurasia Net 16 February 2010: n. pag. Web. 28 Feb 2010.
Branch, John, and Jonathan Abrams. "Luge Athlete's Death Casts Pall Over Games." New York Times (2010): n. pag. Web. 23 Feb 2010. .
Hainsworth, Steve. "A Whistler Local’s Olympic View: Death at the Games overshadows Opening ." examiner.com 13 February 2010: n. pag. Web. 28 Feb 2010. .

Taussig, Michael. "Tactility and Distraction." Cultural Anthropology. 6.2 (1991): 147-153.

Taussig, Michael. "The Language of Flowers." Critical Inquiry. 30. (2003): 99-131. Print.