First Flying Females
We watched our tour guide casually hop over a barricade and
stand with his heels on the brink, very much alone. Behind him, the ground
dropped away and the magnificent Wasatch Mountains spread across the horizon.
The wind whipped frozen snowflakes into our eyes and into our gaping mouths.
The view from the top of the Olympic ski jump in Park City, Utah is
breathtaking from the platform. At the very edge of the steeply sloping strip,
where the jumpers perch in preparation for their 60 mph catapult run from track
to air to landing, the view actually takes your breath away. As we stamped our
feet to keep warm, I could not stop wondering, “why would anyone in his or her right
mind voluntarily do this?”
The 2014 winter Olympic games, opening in Russia this week,
will be history-making as the very first female ski jumpers will be allowed to
compete. This is not for lack of wanting to compete in previous games, nor for
a lack of trying to compete on an Olympic level. When the winter Olympics
became gender inclusive in 1991, (yes, you read that right) the 1924 inaugural events,
including ski jumping, were not included. Some old timers even went so far as
to suggest that ski jumping could damage a woman’s reproductive organs. And
here I am so naïve, it never occurred to me that there was not a women’s event.
I thought I just hadn’t caught it on TV.
This is not to say that women have not been ski jumping for
more than a century and competing globally in the past decade. The American
team, boasts the 2013 World Cup champion and brings impressive credentials to
the Sochi games. I can’t wait to see how they compare to their male
counterparts. According to the official Women’s Ski Jumping website, the women
will only compete in one of three possible events: the 90-meter normal hill jump.
Interestingly, just before the 2010 games in Vancouver, American Lindsey Van
held a Vancouver K95 record of 105.5 meters for both men and women. That
distance would have earned her a podium spot in the men’s competition that
year. Instead, she joined a dozen current and former female jumpers in a lawsuit
that eventually gave her the right to do this officially in 2014.
In January we visited the Olympic Park, built just outside
of Park City in 2002 for the games hosted by the US. Along with our tour, we
saw current qualifying action in the luge, bobsled, skeleton and freestyle
skiing. Most of these sports share terrifying speed, little physical
protection, and contact with frozen surfaces that defy common sense. And yet,
these athletes are just so enthusiastic about their sports. We were enjoying a
hot drink and mulling aloud, these aspects of winter sport, when a woman
sitting nearby joined the conversation. A former Olympian herself, she is the
coach of the women’s bobsled team. She looked pretty sane to me and very kindly
explained the mechanics of successfully piloting the 2-person bullet-shaped
sleds. Speed and subtlety are key components. A tiny shift in weight can send
the dual runners beneath the sled in the wrong direction. She explained that the
skeleton is a sled sport where single competitors lie on their stomachs, head
up, much like we do as children on a gloriously snow covered hill. The luge is
also a flat sled but with the opposite technique: single competitors lie on
their backs, unable to see where they are going. All of these events go
careening down the same ice-covered tube, which is carefully tended by hand
with paint brushes and water. There is no Zamboni to smooth out the ice surface
like in hockey. Thank God they all wear helmets.
So, how do these brave ski jumpers get their start? I guess
it is like anything else, you just see someone else doing it and think, “I can
do that, it might be fun.” Most American jumpers hail from Park City and Lake
Placid, NY, both sites of winter Olympic games. They usually start between ages
5 and 8 and work their way up from 10, 20, and 40-meter hills to the 90-meter
competition runs. Youngsters and female jumpers have historically done what is
called “forejumping,” where they take the jump just before an official
competition to determine the effects of wind, temperature and weather. Our
guide laughingly calls them guinea pigs, adding that it is a privilege and the
last step before becoming a competitor.
Like most Olympic athletes, ski jumpers train year round. In
Utah, they do their summer jumps on the same winter runs with the ice being
replaced by ceramic tracks and grass-like hills. They fly, with the classic
V-shape of their skis, bodies bent slightly forward, arms just away from their
sides. Instead of landing in a telemark on snow, with one leg ahead of the
other, knees bent, the summer jumpers land in a large pool of water. They get
the same height, no more than 15 feet above the ground, and claim the same
distance thanks to the laws of physics. The facility runs clinics for ordinary
folks who want to give this a try, sans ice. You see mostly photos of children
doing this, big smiles and dripping hair in each shot.
One of the toughest challenges, our new coach friend told
us, is not so much a physical one but is difficult nonetheless: raising funds
to keep the training going year round and between competitions. When watching
the athletes on TV at the Olympic games, it is easy to forget that these are
people who have jobs, families, and lives off of their skis, skates and sleds.
“It is truly passion and love for the sport that keeps us all going,” she says
smiling.
We stood at the base of the freestyle ski hill watching the
young competitors practice. Their coach stood in the middle of the hill with a
walkie talkie and we could hear her encourage each one, giving criticism here
and there. Each young skier soared through the air, landed with determination
and trudged over to the lift to ride back to the top to do it again. And again.
We left that day with a deep appreciation for the vast preparation required for
that penultimate 10-second jump.
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