WHISTLER, B.C. – It took a few minutes for Jay Paulus of Seattle to realize where he and his family were standing Saturday night as they watched the opening Olympic luge runs at the Whistler Sliding Centre.

Then he noticed the new wood wall across from him and the newly padded steel poles. He was standing just a few feet away from the site of Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvili’s fatal crash the day before.

“It’s eerie and it makes me think about these guys,” Paulus said motioning to a giant monitor showing a slider pushing off on his run. “I’m more aware of the look in their eye and I realize what they must be going through.”

Nowhere in the Olympic motto “Swifter, Higher, Stronger” is there anything about mental toughness, but that’s what was most impressive about the sliders Saturday.

“These guys are extreme athletes,” Paulus said. “They take a risk every time they come down they risk their lives.”

American Tony Benshoof was the first to run the course Saturday morning in a training run. He wouldn’t allow himself to dwell on the fatality.

“Everyone deals with these things differently,” Benshoof said. “I can’t personally deal with it until after the Games.”

American Chris Mazdzer was the first slider down the track in competition.

“We’ve been doing this our entire lives,” Mazdzer said. “I love doing this. … There is always that element (of danger) but you have to push that out of your head.”

Clearly, the athletes dealt with the tragedy must better than the Canadian coach and the International Luge Federation (FIL) officials.

Canada coach Wolfgang Staudinger called the accident “100 percent” driver error.

“That was not a track issue,” Staudinger said. “It was a driving error.”

The FIL concurred after investigating the course and video, but that was to be expected. As was VANOC’s hand wringing.

“We believe in terms of the things we did as an organizing committee working with the international federations we did everything in our power to make that track as safe as we can,” said VANOC vice president Tim Gayda.

Apparently, everything didn’t include putting international concerns ahead of home ice advantage.

Sliding athletes have voiced concern about the lack of training time and the danger of the course for nearly a year.

In September, bobsledder Steven Holcomb went as far as to say the course was “built backward” because the harder turns are lower on the course. Bobsledder Bree Schaaf said the course is the fastest in the world, making it “inherently risky.”

Even the FIL said it didn’t want future courses to be any faster than Whistler’s.

Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili told reporters Saturday: “They said that what happened yesterday was because of human error. Well, with all due respect … one thing I know for sure, that no sports mistake is supposed to lead to a death.”

And while the FIL also placed the blame on Kumaritashvili, it seemed to contradict itself by immediately making dramatic changes to the course.

It changed the profile of the course, added a wooden wall to keep sliders from flying off the track (“I didn’t think it was possible to leave the track,” Canadian luger Ian Cockerline said.) and moved the start lower down the course to reduce speed.

This reduces the importance of experience, Staudinger said, something Kumaritashvili had significantly less of than the medal contenders.

While many have complained about the lack of training time for non-Canadians on the track, Staudinger says that’s common practice at the games so the home team has an advantage.

He said Canada was promised 35 training runs on the Turin track at the ’06 games. It only got 15. He said Kumaritashvili had “about 40” runs on the course before his death.

“There is absolutely no regret,” Staudinger said.

However, even Canadian luger Samuel Edney says maybe a courses as fast as Whistler’s should offer more training time.

Ironically, the home field advantage Canada was trying to attain might vanished when

Kumaritashvili died.

The Canadian men had never trained from the women’s starting point before Saturday. Just like everybody else.

“We were all ready to race from the top,” Staudinger said of the lower starting point. “Then we could have played our home field advantage.”