Saba Kumaritashvili fulfils late cousin’s dream 12 years on, Brit’s Covid battle – Beijing diary

Saba keeps family dream alive Saba Kumaritashvili said his Olympic performance honoured his cousin Nodar, 12 years after his tragic death on the luge track at the Vancouver Games. Ad/> “I wasn’t afraid. I wanted to be in the Olympics to race,” he said.

Beijing 2022Why are athletes given pandas not medals on the podium? Is it because of Covid?AN HOUR AGO “I think about Nodar. I think about him all the time. Everyone in my family is in luge.

After Nodar, I didn’t want luge to die in Georgia, I wanted to keep it going. “My parents didn’t object to me going into luge. I think they wanted it more than me.

“Nodar is one of the reasons I’m in luge. We have 10 years’ age difference, so I don’t remember much of him, only moments.” /> Covid somehow strikes down Young British cross-country skier Andrew Young moved mountains to try to avoid Covid but couldn’t escape the virus and nearly missed his fourth Olympics. The 29-year-old lived like a hermit in a cabin in the Norwegian mountains and left his bolthole only twice — once to go to a shop and then to compete in a local ski race.

Still he tested positive three weeks ago. Young has clearly shed the virus quickly enough to come back negative on hyper-sensitive Chinese arrival tests and entered the closed loop here yesterday. “Nobody knows how it's even possible he got it! We started stressing quite a lot after that because if he managed to get it, it's so, so easy to get,” said training partner Andrew Musgrave.