Women can compete in every sport in the Winter Olympics except one: ski jumping. A cadre of high-flying women is fighting to change that, but will they succeed in time for the 2010 Vancouver games? If all goes perfectly at their first-ever World Championship on February 18 in Liberec, Czech Republic, they just might.
By Kristin Bjornsen
February 2008: It’s just a small competition in the little-known town of Rastbuchl, Germany. Lindsey Van, 24, sits on a metal bar at the top of the ski jump, perched like a human cannonball above the steep ramp. She looks intently at her coach. When a nearby light flashes from yellow to green, he flags her with his arm, and she fires off the bar. Barreling downward in a tuck position, wind whipping by, Lindsey quickly reaches some 50 miles per hour. At the lip of the jump—the critical moment—she launches into the air, skis whipping to the side in a V formation, her body arrow straight. The air buffets her upward for as long as it can, then Lindsey gently sails to the ground. Her skis touch, her legs lunge . . . and then she feels her right knee explode.
At least that’s what it felt like, Lindsey says. It turns out she had pulverized all the cartilage in the back of her knee, the coup de grâce after years of cumulative damage. “I could feel quarter-sized chunks of cartilage under the skin and could push them around,” she says. Come March she was in surgery and starting months of rehab. A frustrating setback, yes, but Lindsey is no stranger to the vicissitudes of the ski-jumping world.
Lindsey began jumping when she was seven in Park City, Utah, where she grew up, and has been competing internationally since 1995—longer than any of the other six women jumpers on the U.S. Ski Team. She’s also one of the most accomplished jumpers, having snagged 13 National Championships and several podium finishes in the Continental Cup (an international competition circuit), not to mention holding the North American distance record, with a jump of 171 meters.
‘They’re Not Good Enough’
Read or listen to National Public Radio’s report on Lindsey Van and the other women ski jumpers who want to compete in Vancouver in 2010.
“Gender Barrier Persists At Vancouver Olympics” by Howard Berkes
Still, Lindsey knows that the clock is ticking. Calling herself the “grandma of the team,” she realizes that the body puts up with such pounding for only so long, and her teammates are all in their teens and early twenties. But before she even thinks about hanging up her skis, one burning goal remains: to compete in ski jumping at the Olympics—the crowning event in a jumper’s career and one in which women have never been allowed to participate since the founding of the Winter Olympics in 1924.
So it was with heartbreak and disbelief that Lindsey and her teammates learned in May 2006 that the International Olympic Committee (IOC) would once again not allow women ski jumpers to compete in the 2010 Vancouver games—on the grounds that women’s ski jumping doesn’t have enough competitors, participating countries, or international experience (although proponents point out that the sport has more participants than several other Winter Olympics events).
“We’d all gathered at a teammate’s house, waiting for the call,” says Lindsey. “And when the ‘no’ came, it was mind-blowing. I still can’t fathom why we’re not allowed in.”
Neither can Deedee Corradini, mayor of Salt Lake City from 1992 to 2000 and president of Women’s Ski Jumping USA, a nonprofit organization that works to support female jumpers. As mayor and as executive board member of the Salt Lake Olympic Organizing Committee, Corradini helped get women’s bobsleigh and skeleton into the 2002 games and is now a powerful advocate for the female jumpers.
“It’s clearly discrimination to keep women jumpers out of the Olympics,” says Corradini. “The girls thought they’d get into the Nagano games in 1998 and were told no. Then they hoped to get into the Salt Lake games in 2002, then the Torino games in 2006, and now the 2010 Vancouver games—and were told no for all three. How much longer do they have to wait?”
In protest Women’s Ski Jumping USA and other groups worldwide are racing the clock to get the IOC’s decision reversed, with one lawsuit already filed against the Vancouver Olympic Organizing Committee (see “The Road to Vancouver” sidebar).
The Litmus Test
Meanwhile the women did receive some good news in 2006: the International Ski Federation (FIS), the sport’s governing body, established the first Women’s Ski Jumping World Championship, to take place February 18 to March 1, 2009, in Liberec, Czech Republic. This marks the highest level of competition currently available to them. It also will be an important test.
The Road to Vancouver
Women ski jumpers haven’t waved the white flag on the 2010 Winter Games just yet.
In many ways, women have made great strides toward equal representation at the Olympics. In fact, in 1991 a new Olympic rule stipulated that any new event must have a men’s and women’s competition. Ski jumping, however, was “grandmothered” out of this rule, says Deedee Corradini, president of the nonprofit Women’s Ski Jumping USA, because it wasn’t a new event, as it had been part of the games since 1924.
But pressure has been growing to add women’s jumping, and in May 2006 the International Ski Federation voted 114 to 1 to petition the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to admit it into the 2010 Vancouver games. That November the IOC denied the petition, saying women’s ski jumping had neither enough competitors nor participating countries and hadn’t yet had two World Championships. Corradini says these reasons hold no water, citing as support the following facts:
• During the 2006–2007 season, 89 women ski jumpers from 14 countries competed at the elite Continental Cup competitions. That’s more competitors than participated in bobsleigh (which had 26 women from 13 nations), snowboard cross (34 women from 10 nations), and the just-added event ski cross (30 women from 11 nations).
• In 2007 the IOC removed from its charter the requirement that a sport must have had two World Championships before it can be added to the Olympics.
People haven’t accepted the IOC decision quietly, though. In 2008, 10 female ski jumpers from around the world—including Lindsey and Jessica—launched a gender-discrimination lawsuit against the Vancouver Olympic Organizing Committee (VanOC). (Canadian law firm Davis LLP is handling the case pro bono.) Their argument is that because the 2010 Olympics will use government funds and public equipment, it must provide equal opportunities to men and women or be in violation of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
VanOC declined to comment for this article because the lawsuit is still before the courts. In a statement released last summer, however, Cathy Priestner, executive vice president of sports and games operations for VanOC, said that the Vancouver games “could support [ski jumping] from a logistical and operational standpoint” but that “the final decision lies with the IOC, and we respect and accept the IOC’s decision regarding women’s ski jumping. We encourage the women ski jumpers to focus their efforts on 2014.”
Corradini expects a ruling on the lawsuit in spring 2009, soon enough for women to jump at the games. “It’s absolutely still possible for them to be at Vancouver—and there’s no reason for them not to be.”
“All eyes, including FIS’s and International Olympic Committee’s, will be on the event, watching to see how it goes,” says John Farra, Nordic director of the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Association. For a successful comp, Farra says, several things must happen: the women must demonstrate world-class jumping skills; the competition should be tight, rather than having a few women dominate; and the event organizers need to promote it with the same fervor as men’s jumping. “If all that happens, there’s no way the IOC can deny the path women’s jumping is on.”
So, while Lindsey may cast an occasional longing eye toward Vancouver, she—along with top American contenders Jessica Jerome and Alissa Johnson—is mostly focusing on the World Championship. The first job for Lindsey was rehabbing her blown knee. During her surgery last March, doctors drilled tiny holes in her kneecap to increase blood flow and speed healing. Then for eight solid weeks, Lindsey sat on the couch, watching the snow fall in Park City, her leg in a machine that slowly and continuously changed the knee’s angle to keep fluids moving.
“It was terrible,” says the normally unflappable Lindsey. “I wanted to shoot myself in the head from sheer boredom.” Afterward it was PT, PT, some yoga, and then more PT.
Standing 5 feet 3 inches tall (her skis are 7 feet 3 inches long), Lindsey has chestnut hair, legs like pistons, and a slender upper body. She also has a wry sense of humor and a matter-of-fact way of speaking. On her right foot is a tattoo that says “starboard” (her twin brother has one that says “port” because he was on the left side of his mom’s womb while Lindsey was on the right). And in September she got a tattoo of a ski jumper on her hip. (“It got infected and looks terrible,” she says.) After six months of rehab, Lindsey heralded her first day back on skis since the injury on September 9, and just five days later she finished fourth at a Continental Cup competition in Lillehammer, Norway.
When describing the Lillehammer comp, it would not be an exaggeration to say that the American women kicked butt. Alissa, 21, placed first—her first time on the podium—and Jessica, 21, grabbed second. About 100 women from 15 countries compete at these elite, international comps, with Norway, Austria, Germany, Japan, and the United States being the principal powerhouses. The girls had little time to savor their success, however, because the next week it was off to Germany and the Czech Republic for more comps and then to New York for the National Championships (where Lindsey scored her thirteenth title).
A Hopp Back
The chance for women to compete internationally like this has been a long time coming. The origins of ski jumping date back centuries to Norway, where the main mode of winter travel was skiing. People would “hopp” (as they called jumping then) off knolls and roofs for fun. In 1860 Sondre Norheim, the “father of ski jumping,” set a record of 30 meters, which held for more than three decades. The first competition took place in Trysil, Norway, in 1862. Later, at the first Winter Olympics in 1924 in Chamonix, France, ski jumping was one of the eight sports included. Through it all, jumping has been almost exclusively the domain of men. The sport was considered too extreme, dangerous, and unladylike for women.
One of the first trail-blazing women to change that was Isabel Patricia Coursier. Born March 21, 1906, in Revelstoke, British Columbia, Isabel grew up with skis on her feet. Although she never received formal coaching, the sheer fun of jumping lured her. By age 16 she was stomping 80-foot jumps and, later, 100-foot jumps—a huge distance in the 1920s. Importantly, she did the jumps solo. At that time, on the rare occasion when a woman would ski jump, a man would—no joke—ski beside her down the ramp, holding her hand. In 1923 Isabel performed exhibition jumps on Mount Rainier before a large audience that included then-president Warren Harding and received a standing ovation and a medal. Isabel—who, according to records, never married—went on to teach physical education, skiing, and art in the United Kingdom and Canada and died on October 16, 1980.
Not until the 1970s and ’80s did a significant number of women start jumping, albeit with little formal support or organizational backing. Momentum was building, however, and in the 1990s it reached a tipping point. Women’s ski jumping was added to the national competition circuit in 1995 and to the Continental Cup in 2004. Scores of ski-jumping clubs and camps for girls started sprouting up nationwide. Though there are no hard statistics on how many girls in the United States ski jump, “things have changed dramatically,” says Lindsey. “There were hardly any female ski jumpers in the world when I started doing it,” she says. “Now it’s much more accepted.”
One reason why more girls are flocking to the sport, says John Farra, is that “there’s now a future in the sport, such as scholarships and international competitions and, hopefully soon, the Olympics.” The sea change of the past 10 years is epitomized by one major event: the addition of women jumpers to the U.S. Ski Team in the 2005–2006 season. This enabled women to receive the support and the infrastructure of the team. Previously, funds were raised through Women’s Ski Jumping USA and at international comps. “The men would stay in hotels while the women had to grovel for a place to stay, sometimes sleeping in barns with leaky roofs, freezing to death,” says Corradini. Now that they’re on the U.S. Ski Team, however, they get a travel budget; they train on Park City’s Olympic-class jumps, both in the winter (on snow) and in the summer (on plastic); and they have expert coaches, physical therapists, nutritionists, and even a sports psychologist. In fact, they have many of these resources to themselves because currently there’s no men’s ski-jumping team: the two best American male jumpers retired in 2006, and so far no other guys have been ready with the world-class skills needed to make the team.
Prepare for Takeoff
Lindsey, Jessica (who first jumped when she was seven), and Alissa (first jump at age five) put these newfound resources to intense use. They train six days a week—three days on the hill for about four hours and three days in the gym for three hours, lifting weights and doing endless plyometrics such as jump squats, box jumps, and hurdle jumps with weighted vests. Although all three are students at Salt Lake–area universities, they often take a reduced class load or semesters off to accommodate their competition schedules.
Then there’s nutrition. Ski jumpers have a saying: Fat don’t fly. Consequently, anorexia and other eating disorders have long plagued the sport. “People would be extremely thin, exhausted, and weak, but they were still winning World Cups,” says Jessica. “They were so light, they flew.” To combat this the FIS adopted weight minimums in 2004. Lindsey, for example, at 5 foot 3, has to weigh at least 112 pounds. The team’s nutritionist helps the women achieve this lean but healthy balance with guidelines tailored to each athlete. For Lindsey the main rule is no junk food. “It can be so hard sometimes, when all you want is ice cream or chicken wings.” Initially, she was told to count calories as well, but she stopped doing that. “It was driving me crazy. You shouldn’t obsess about food that much,” she says.
Along with physical fitness, mental toughness plays an equally important role. Hurdling yourself into the ether at 50 miles per hour takes a certain mind-set. What racks the girls’ nerves, however, isn’t so much the fear of falling but the fear of failing. Competition anxiety translates to bad jumps: muscles fire at the wrong time, focus drifts, and mistakes get made. To relax they use a variety of tricks: not looking at result sheets between jumps, breathing deeply, and treating each jump like any other.
Soar or Be Bored
Most of their physical and mental training goes toward mastering one critical moment: the takeoff at the end of the jump. Lindsey, Jessica, and Alissa unanimously agree that the hardest part isn’t beelining down the jump, perfecting the landing, or holding the V position while soaring through the air. (Actually, “This flight position comes together very easily,” Jessica says, which is surprising considering it took them 100-plus years to discover it. Instead, in the early days people jumped with their skis parallel and their bodies ramrod straight, like a plastic action figure tossed into the air.)
No, the hardest part, they say, the few milliseconds that make or break a jump, occur at the lip, when the person launches into the air. The lip actually slants downward, not upward, so the skier must explode up and out to keep her height and momentum. In this very powerful and technical move, everything must be dead on: the direction of the hips, the timing of the jump, and “the angle of everything— face, shoulders, shins, and spine,” says Jessica. If it goes badly, you know it immediately, and it’s pretty much game over.
Alissa adds that you can try to compensate in the air by holding your head lower and your arms closer, “but then you’re in a much more aggressive, less stable stance. They call it ‘pushing negatives’ when you’re teetering over your skis instead of on top of them.” In contrast, when you have a perfect launch it’s the equivalent of a musician’s hitting the right note, a writer’s turning the perfect phrase, or an archer’s striking the bull’s eye—times 10: “Even if you’ve had 100 bad jumps, that one good jump changes everything,” says Jessica. A good takeoff also lets you fly really far—as far as men, in fact. Which may be part of the problem.
The X Factor
Although women sometimes need more speed or a longer in-run (the length of the jump) to go the same distance as men, ski jumping is one sport in which there isn’t a large gap between men’s and women’s performances. Unfortunately, this may explain some of the resistance to letting women jump. “Ski jumping was one of the first extreme sports, and it’s sort of an old boys’ club,” says Lindsey. “Women entering it takes away some of the ‘extreme’ value for some.”
Despite the extreme nature of ski jumping, it has an impressive safety record and is, in fact, much safer than most alpine racing. For example, of the past 3,000 ski-flying jumps, there have been only eight falls, none of them serious. Partly this is because ski jumping is very regulated—the landing zones, the slope of the hill, and the size of the in-run are so precisely calculated that serious accidents rarely occur.
Accidents do happen, though, and Lindsey, Jessica, and Alissa have all sustained injuries. Take Alissa, for example. In 2003 she caught an edge and fell—the icy slope tore the skin off one side of her face and gave her a concussion. She wore a baseball hat to school to hide her face until a teacher told her to take the hat off. “When I did, one of the kids in class started screaming, and I ran out of the room crying,” she says, laughing. Then, in 2004 she tore her ACL (anterior cruciate ligament); and in 2007, after she landed a jump, her ski tip got caught in the grass stopping area. Her body rotated 360 degrees around her trapped foot, tearing three ligaments in her ankle and bruising the bone. Lying there, waiting for help, “I felt very scared, hurt, and lost,” she says.
What keeps them coming back despite the injuries—and the bureaucratic resistance to female jumpers? This too the girls unanimously agree on: the feeling of flight. Ask them what that’s like, however, and they grope for words, eventually settling with, “It’s indescribable.”
Alissa nails it down the best: “I love how when you let go of the bar, you’re in it 100 percent—you can’t stop and there’s no going back.” Then when you launch into the deep blue above, you leave the red tape, the frustrations, and even the Olympics behind, on the ground, and you’re free to just fly.
UPDATE:
Judge Denies Women Ski Jumpers Relief, But Finds Discrimination
Vancouver – BC Supreme Court Justice Lauri Ann Fenlon has denied the 15 elite women ski jumpers suing VANOC the declaration they sought, but found discrimination by the International Olympic Committee, but she will not declare that if the men’s ski jumping events are held at the 2010 Olympic Winter Games, then women’s ski jumping events must be held as well.
According to the plaintiff’s lawyer Ross Clark, Q.C., though Madame Justice Fenlon found VANOC is subject to the Charter when it carries out the activities of planning, organizing and staging the Games, the decision of whether women’s ski jumping is an Olympic event is beyond VANOC’s control.
“We are disappointed that the women’s right to participate in 2010 has not been recognized by the Court,” Clark said. “But we respect the Court’s opinion and we believe we had a fair hearing. We accept the judge’s ruling, but we also need time to consider whether we will appeal.”
Deedee Corradini, president of Women Ski Jumping-USA, said it’s terribly disappointing, but the experience and effort was important.
“No one wanted to go to court over this, but we had no choice,” she explained. “We did everything possible, followed the rules, grew the sport, held World Championships and the IOC remained opposed to including women in ski jumping. We won’t give up until women’s ski jumping is in the Olympics, but it’s unfortunate this legal effort failed and they won’t be in 2010.”
Katie Willis, a highly ranked Canadian ski jumper and one of the plaintiffs said she was very distressed by the news.
“It’s awful that we lost, but I’m glad we tried,” Willis said. “We needed to try every possible avenue to get into the Olympics and when my Canadian teammates and I were frustrated with the Canadian government’s lack of effort with the IOC, we had no choice but to join the lawsuit.”
Jessica Jerome, another plaintiff and a member of the American women’s ski jumping team, said the news has left her “extremely disheartened.”
“We did the best we could, and all we can do is hope for a better outcome in the future. Of course, it’s extremely disheartening,” Jerome pointed out. “I feel like we were trying to do the right thing to advance the sport as a whole, not just for the girls currently competing, but for the upcoming generation as well. Unfortunately, this decision will affect a lot of talented skiers. I am hopeful the future of women’s ski jumping will look more promising.”
Ski jumping is the only sport in the Olympic Winter Games not open to both men and women.
For a PDF copy of the judgment, go to www.wsjusa.com or www.courts.gov.bc.ca.
