The last remaining open quota spot for a luge athlete at the Milan Cortina Olympics cannot be reallocated, the International Luge Federation said Thursday, despite hopes by some sliders that it would be awarded.
By International Olympic Committee rule, the FIL was allowed to have up to 106 athletes at the Olympics. When Austria’s Wolfgang Kindl secured a quota spot in both men’s singles and men’s doubles — he’s the only luge slider in this year’s field to qualify for multiple spots — that could have opened up a place for one more athlete.
But the Olympic field for the games is also capped at 25 men’s singles and 25 women’s singles sliders — and all those spots are taken, which essentially tied the FIL’s hands and left it unable to add another slider to one of those fields. Either way, the total of 105 luge athletes represents the fewest in an Olympic luge competition since 93 were in the field at the 1998 Nagano Games.
It’ll also be the lowest number of nations represented in an Olympic luge competition since 17 took part in the 1984 Sarajevo Games. There are 19 federations expected to compete in Cortina d’Ampezzo next month; that includes two Russian sliders who are in the Olympic field and will be permitted to compete as neutral athletes.
There are seven federations — Moldova, Britain, Georgia, Taiwan, Bulgaria, Ireland and Bosnia and Herzegovina — that had at least one slider in the 2022 Beijing Games but did not get a quota spot for Milan Cortina, a clear sign that it’s now far more difficult for nations that are trying to develop sliding programs to get into the Olympic fields.
Mirza Nikolajev of Bosnia and Herzegovina is the men’s singles slider who was next in line for a spot; Elsa Desmond of Ireland was the next-eligible for the women’s singles field. Nikolajev and Desmond both competed in Beijing four years ago.
For now, the breakdown of luge athletes headed to Cortina is 58 men and 47 women. That’s closer to even than the sport has ever been on the Olympic stage, thanks to women’s doubles being added to the luge program for the first time.
Only 11 women’s doubles sleds were permitted into the field, and four of the top nine sleds in the world rankings didn’t make the Olympic cut — including a two-time world champion team from Germany and what would be a second qualifying sled from the U.S.
“When you only allocate 11 Olympic spots, then that’s where all of our funding comes from, so from a base level, there’s no incentive from countries to push more sleds into it,” USA Luge women’s Olympian Emily Fischnaller said earlier this month when the American team was unveiled. “So, it’s such a systemic thing. Yes, this is a step in the right direction, and it is exciting that we get to have a new discipline. At the same time, you’re pushing out a lot of people.”
The Olympic field, as of Thursday, included 12 sliders from Germany, 11 apiece from Austria, Italy and the U.S., and 10 each from Ukraine and Latvia.
Romania (seven sliders), Canada (6), China (6), Poland (6), Slovakia (5), Sweden (2), neutral athletes (2), Argentina (1), Switzerland (1), South Korea (1), Australia (1), the Czech Republic (1) and Japan (1) are also going to be represented in luge at Cortina.
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