02/09/2026
In 2010 there was an Olympian who lost his life during Olympic competition. Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvili died on February 12, 2010, during a training run for the Vancouver Winter Olympics, just hours before the opening ceremony when he crashed at high speed and struck a steel support pole on the track. His death highlighted the danger of high-speed sliding sports like luge and led to immediate safety changes on that track, including raising walls and modifying start positions to reduce speeds. 
Sadly, this tragedy happened despite safety protocols — a stark reminder of how crucial course design and environmental control are to athlete safety.
As a professional, when the site supervisor called me asking for a solution to a condensation problem on a refrigerated ice course, I had a technical answer.
The upper concrete area was creating condensation due to its cooling system, which had the opposite effect of in-floor heating. Rather than warming, it was chilling the slab surface, causing moisture in the air to condense on that cold concrete. That condensation dripped onto the ice deck around three of the corners and created dangerously slippery patches.
My task was to stop the condensation and prevent water from dripping onto the ice corners, which was making those areas much more slippery than they should have been.
The solution involved:
• Addressing the thermal bridge in the concrete slab by modifying the insulation and drainage so that the slab surface stayed closer to ambient temperature rather than cold enough to condense humidity.
• Improving environmental humidity control in the upper part of the facility so that excess moisture no longer condensed on cooled surfaces.
• Installing targeted heating or v***r barriers where needed to eliminate cold spots that could act as condensation nuclei.
By eliminating the source of water on the ice, we were able to significantly reduce the slippery patches around those corners and improve overall track safety and consistency.