15 Feb Thumbs Down for Google Over Luge Death

Is it just me, or was Google’s logo on Saturday in very bad taste? When I logged on at about 9am Saturday morning (UK time) I was, I have to say, astounded to see the illustrated logo featuring a luge athlete, given the shocking death the day before of Nodar Kumaritashvili. The 21 year old Georgian was killed in practice for the event, when his sled was ejected from the ice chute at 140 kilometres per hour, slamming into a steel beam.

After my initial amazement, it occurred to me that maybe the logo was a tribute to Kumaritashvili. But, as you can see from the above screen grab that I took at the time, there is no tribute message around it and the ALT tag simply read ‘Vancouver 2010’. I checked back later in the day (around 2pm GMT) and the logo was still in place, with the same ALT tag.

It strikes me that this was one almightily insensitive screw up from Google, which quite obviously has a complete set of logos to roll out during the Winter Olympics. Quite aside from uploading the logo in the first place, how on earth was it in place for most of, if not all of the day on Saturday? I would actually be writing this in appreciation of Google had the original logo been adjusted as a tribute but, to me at least, in Twitter language, this has to go down as a big #fail. Or am I being over-sensitive?

tweetmeme_source = ‘ThePaulSutton’; tweetmeme_url = ‘http://tribalboogie.blogspot.com/2010/02/thumbs-down-for-google-over-luge-death.html’;

 Like This Post? Subscribe to Tribal Boogie