Women keep pushing for parity in ski jumping. It’s been a tough hill to climb

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 04/02/2022 (1335 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

BEIJING There’s a new Olympic event being spun as a move toward gender equity in the male-dominated sphere of ski jumping. But the math is still a head scratcher.

After excluding women from Olympic competition for most of a century, the International Olympic Committee finally bowed to pressure (not to mention the bad publicity that came with legal action) and welcomed women ski jumpers in 2014. Eight years later, the IOC is calling the 2022 Beijing Olympics “the most gender-balanced edition of the Winter Olympic Games to date,” with 45 per cent of competitors identifying as women. And in that vein, it’s unveiling a second ski jumping event that includes women — the mixed team, in which national squads consisting of two men and two women compete for the podium.

You’ll excuse the two women slated to represent Canada if they check the facts before they pat Olympic organizers on the back. It’s not that Abigail Strate, 20, and Alexandria Loutitt, 18, aren’t grateful for another opportunity to compete — they’ve both been possessed by the sport since they were kids growing up in Calgary. They’ve gone to amazing lengths to pursue their craft during the pandemic, transplanting themselves, with the rest of Canada’s ski-jumping team, to Slovenia in the wake of the shuttering of Calgary’s ski-jump facility in 2018. And as Olympic rookies, Strate and Loutitt are well aware of the struggle that won them the chance to be Olympians.

Still, there’s opportunity and then there’s parity — and ski jumping at the 2022 Olympics isn’t exactly the definition of the latter.

Men, after all, get the chance to compete in four pure ski-jumping events at these Olympics — the individual normal hill, the individual large hill, the men’s team event and the mixed team event. They can also compete in nordic combined, which pairs ski jumping and cross-country skiing and is the only Winter Olympic sport that doesn’t include women.

Women, meanwhile, can compete in ski jumping’s individual normal hill and in the mixed team event.

“It definitely gives us another chance,” Loutitt said. “But the boys get a fourth event. And we’re just getting our second.”

To stand at the base of China’s National Ski Jumping Centre and squint up at the athletes preparing to launch themselves off its two ramps is to marvel at the nerve of the competitors. For Canada’s Olympic ski jumpers — Mackenzie Boyd-Clowes and Matthew Soukup round out the Calgary-bred foursome — it’s possible that overcoming the fear of a high-risk, high-speed sport has ranked among the least of their troubles over the past few years.

First, there’s been the fallout of dealing with the faded legacy of the 1988 Olympics and the financially driven decommissioning of the iconic ski-jumping facility, not to mention the sliding centre for bobsled, luge and skeleton, both of which helped create scores of Canadian Olympians.

“Every time I see (the Calgary ski-jumping tower), a little piece of me just dies. Because they look like we could still jump them, if they just let us in,” Strate said.

Said Loutitt: “It’s heartbreaking watching those hills kind of fizzle away, and watching the sport go with them.”

When the pandemic made travelling to U.S. ski-jumping facilities a difficult prospect, Canada’s team transplanted itself to Slovenia, one of the European epicentres of the sport.

“There’s hard days. You want to go home, you want to see your family,” Loutitt said. “It’s not like you’re completely alone — you’ve got your teammates — but it’s difficult when they’re also struggling … I’ve been really relying on my family for their support. I probably call my mom two hours every day.”

Canada’s ski-jumping program is one of just two Winter Olympic sports that doesn’t get any funding from Own The Podium; the other is nordic combined. And maybe that’s fair. A Canadian jumper has never done better at an Olympics than Horst Bulau’s seventh place at the 1988 Games. None of the Canadians here are seen as medal contenders. As a mixed team, the foursome finished 10th at the 2021 world championships.

Still, it’s a classic chicken-and-egg problem. It’s hard to build a medallist without a program. But you can’t fund a program without a would-be medallist. Canada’s ski-jumping athletes and their families largely figure out how to make these Olympic dreams come true amongst themselves.

So you’ll understand why Strate and Loutitt, after they spent a couple of hours training on Friday, were excited enough about their current locale that they posed for some souvenir photos with the ski-jumping towers as a backdrop. Loutitt, the youngest member of the team, said she’d never expected to qualify for the Games so soon. Strate said she was fulfilling a lifelong dream.

Being excited to be somewhere, mind you, doesn’t mean you’re wholly accepting of the circumstances. As young women carving a path in a traditionally male domain, they’re hardly naive to the historical struggle of those who have come before them. And even though they were rookies clearly awed by the occasion, they spoke with conviction about the direction their sport clearly ought to be taking.

Neither flinched when they were asked about another ski-jumping absurdity — the fact that only men will ski the vaunted large hill. The large hill, as you’d imagine, shoots skiers farther. Perhaps it’s perceived to be more dangerous, although neither Strate nor Loutitt consider it so. But while women compete on the large hill during the World Cup season, they won’t touch it here.

“As someone who jumps better on a large hill, I’m a little bit upset we don’t get to compete on it at an Olympic Games,” Loutitt said.

The Canadians were far from the only women voicing such concerns.

Winnipeg Free Press | Newsletter

Head Start

Weekday Mornings

A quick glance at the news for the upcoming day.

Sign up for Head Start

Sign Up

I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement.

“It’s getting better, but we are a little bit sad that we didn’t have (a women’s) team competition, but maybe we’ll get it in the next Olympics,” said Slovenia’s Ursa Bogataj. “Big hill and team competitions — it will be very good.”

If Bogataj, 26, sounded certain, there were those less so.

“I don’t know what we can do as athletes,” Strate said. “There have been some athletes who’ve spoken up about (gender inequity) in the past, and all I’ve heard people say is that they’re whining about it. Or that they’re annoying. We’re kind of stuck in a position where we don’t know how to push for what we’ve earned, or what we deserve.”

The only answer is to keep pushing for parity. Maybe one day the Olympic math on gender equity will actually add up.

Dave Feschuk is a Toronto-based sports columnist for the Star. Follow him on Twitter: @dfeschuk