Starting with the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver,
British Columbia, both men and women will win medals
in ski cross, a somewhat gladiatorial freestyle
event that was conceived in the 1990s.
Jessica Jerome, a 19-year-old
from Utah, is among a handful of athletes
competing on the United States women’s ski
jumping team. Doug Pensinger/Getty
Images
But ski jumping, which has been
an Olympic event since the first Winter Games in
1924, will remain a stag party — unless a discrimination
complaint achieves its objective.
Female ski jumpers have been pressing their case.
At the same time, sports with greater youth appeal
are pushing to be added to the Olympic roster, much
the way snowboard cross was added for the 2006 Games
in Turin, Italy.
Despite having a long-term goal of reaching gender
equity, the International Olympic Committee’s executive
board rejected women’s jumping for Vancouver at
its meetings Nov. 28 in Kuwait. But the board approved
ski cross as an event for both men and women. (Women
accounted for 38 percent of the participants at
the Turin Games and for 41 percent at the 2004 Summer
Games in Athens.)
Ski jumping and Nordic combined, which is made up
of ski jumping and cross-country skiing, are the
only disciplines in the Winter Games without women’s
events.
Saying that women’s ski jumping was still in the
early stages of development, the I.O.C. suggested
that the women could perhaps reapply in 2014, when
they will probably have met the criteria for inclusion.
A summary of the Kuwait meetings on the organization’s
Web site said that the I.O.C. board “noted that
it would be closely following the development of
women ski jumping with a view of its inclusion in
future Olympic Games.”
That did not do much to console Jessica Jerome,
a 19-year-old jumper from Utah, who was inspired
by the 2002 Salt Lake Olympics.
“It’s hard to keep yourself motivated for so long
for just a maybe,” she said in a telephone interview.
Jerome is one of five members on the tight-knit
United States women’s jumping team. She and other
young women have flocked to ski jumping in the past
decade, earning financing and support from the United
States ski team. The sport has also earned its own
circuit from the International Ski Federation, known
as the F.I.S.
Jerome’s teammate Lindsey Van, who at 22 is perhaps
the United States’ top female jumper, said there
was a certain adventure in being part of a growing
sport, with its out-of-the-way sites. One event
in Austria included a stay at a barn.
“The sketchiness of it all makes it more interesting,”
Van said. “It’s an indescribable feeling. That’s
why I keep having to go up there again and again.”
Van and Jerome are keeping a close eye on a last-ditch
effort to have their event on the 2010 Olympic program.
This month, a Canadian lawyer plans to file a complaint
with the Canadian Human Rights Commission, arguing
that the exclusion of women constitutes discrimination
under the nation’s human rights act.
“The essence of the complaint would be that public
funding is going into the funding of the ski-jumping
facilities, and that women won’t be allowed to use
them,” the lawyer, Nina Reid, said in a telephone
interview last week from her home in Calgary.
Reid is working fast because the Vancouver organizing
committee is already drafting its intricate plans
for schedules, tickets and television coverage.
The jumping site is under construction in the Callaghan
Valley near Whistler, British Columbia, and will
have 90- and 120-meter jumps. The women frequently
use 90-meter hills on their premier circuit, the
F.I.S. Continental Cup.
Reid is looking for the human rights complaint to
result in a political chain reaction, forcing the
Canadian government to put financial pressure on
Olympic officials. But that appears to be a long
shot.
For one thing, adding women’s jumping to the program
now would violate the I.O.C.’s own charter. A sport’s
governing body is required to have held at least
two world championships to be eligible to become
a new Olympic event. Women’s ski jumping, for all
its rapid growth, will not have its first world
championship until 2009.
This was the chief obstacle that Gian-Franco Kasper,
president of the International Ski Federation and
an I.O.C. member, said he ran into last year when
he lobbied to have the women’s ski jumpers invited
to Vancouver.
Yet female jumpers and their advocates have accused
Kasper of insufficient enthusiasm for including
women. Several years ago, he said in a radio interview
that because of repeated hard landings, the sport
“seems not to be appropriate for ladies from a medical
point of view.”
Kasper says his words — widely cited as evidence
of chauvinism — were taken out of context. He says
he was simply describing antiquated beliefs that
had hindered the sport’s development.
In a telephone interview last week, Kasper said,
“I can tell you our medical commission, which is
made up only of doctors and experts, have informed
us years ago that there was no medical risk.”
Kasper is more defensive about charges that he campaigned
harder on behalf of ski cross. In ski cross, also
known as skiercross, racers compete head to head
on an obstacle course. Less than a decade old and
promoted largely by the Winter X Games and a ski
equipment company, the event rates highly with younger
television audiences.
The F.I.S. has fought hard to bring it under its
jurisdiction and into the Olympic program. The F.I.S.
freestyle committee even adjusted its World Cup
schedule to include the requisite number and distribution
of events and competitors.
Meanwhile, the ski federation’s 15-member jumping
committee, made up exclusively of men, campaigned
hard for women’s ski jumping to be included in the
Olympics.
Whether its efforts pay off remains a long shot.
Anita DeFrantz, an American member of the I.O.C.,
said that Olympic history was full of exceptions
made and rules adjusted.
“We’ve worked very hard to establish gender equity
over these last 15 years, with great success,” she
said. “It seems to me we should finish the work.”
