Legal News

On Legal Liability and the Vancouver Luge Tragedy

By Ashby Jones

The family of the young Georgian luge racer who was tragically killed last Friday during a practice run, has said it isn’t interested in filing a lawsuit over the mishap.

But what if the family changes its mind — as happens from time to time? Would the family or estate of Nodar Kumaritashvili have a legitimate cause of action?

As part of this WSJ story out Wednesday on the crash — and the fateful decisions leading up to the crash that may have helped cause it — we did a little reporting on the lawsuit angle.

Legal experts say that any potential lawsuit against the International Olympic Committee, the International Luge Federation, the designers of the Whistler luge track or anyone else would face significant hurdles. All athletes involved in the Olympics must sign a legal liability waiver with the IOC, which says that they participate at their own risk.

Furthermore, says Doriane Coleman, a professor at Duke Law School, the law in Canada, the U.S., and many other nations provides that people participating in potentially dangerous sports “assume” the risks inherent in them, and therefore are often barred from suing when they’re injured. (n.b., if there’s ever a law professor track-and-field event, we put all our money on Coleman, who, back in the day, ran track for the U.S. and Swiss national teams.)

So we’ve got the assumption of risk. This can, however, be rebutted, if Kumaritashvili’s family or representatives from his estate can show that the track designers or other were reckless or extremely negligent.

Geoffrey Rapp, a law professor at the University of Toledo and sports law expert, says that Kumaritashvili’s case might be helped by a showing that the authorities in Vancouver knew or should have known about potential problems with the track, but failed to make it safer. “Assumption of risk sets up a high bar, but not an insurmountable one,” says Rapp.

“We assume normal risks, but not abnormal risks,” adds Coleman. “If, for instance, it’s completely abnormal for the track’s wall to be below a certain height at the point of impact or if track designers always design walls so the riders cannot flip over them, then you might be able to argue that flipping over a wall and crashing into a beam is simply not a risk inherent in the activity of luging.”

That authorities made changes to the track after the accident might seem to indicate an acknowledgment of fault. But Ryan Rodenberg, a lawyer who teaches sports law at Indiana University, says that for public-policy reasons, such evidence would likely not be admissible in court as proof of such acknowledgment. “You don’t want people shying away from corrections or improvements because they fear they’ll be used against them in court,” said Rodenberg.

Photo: AFP/Getty

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on February 17, 2010 (boomark / email).