Jumpers
It’s (almost) official: women’s ski jumping is now an Olympic sport. Too late! A whole lost generation of Canadian girls – who ought to be the cream of Sochi – have said
hasta la vista
from EXPLORE MAGAZINE, Dec. 2010
The impressive new ski jump at Whistler Olympic Park opened for business on the last day of 2007. The first woman down it was Zoya Lynch.
Fitting—for the then-17-year-old was one of Canada’s top woman ski jumpers. But it was a strange sensation. She was used to jumping in Calgary, where she lived, or in Europe, where she competed on the Continental Cup circuit, the sport’s top tier. This was different. Taking off, at freeway speed, into the wet coastal air of the Callaghan Valley felt more like lifting off in a plane. “The air’s so thick you actually feel it under you,” she says. “It holds you up as you fly. It’s the coolest feeling in the world.” She allows herself to linger there, in that memory. “Thinking about it makes me miss ski jumping.”
Wait a sec. Miss it? Is she injured? Nope. Sick? No. Banned for life for some egregious but hushed-up doping violation? No no no. Then what?
Zoya (Russian for “life”) had met me on a recent rainy evening in Vancouver. She emerged out of the rainy darkness into the Hopper light of a coffee place on Main Street. She looked elfin. The hoodie of her jacket almost totally obscured her face, made her look like a diminutive jeaned skate kid of undetermined gender. But then over the course of an hour the hood slipped slowly off, and her blond braids spilled out, and she was striking. She sipped a rooibos tea with soy milk.
What unfolded next was the story of a whole childhood invested in one fairly obscure sport.
You hear of certain kids “growing up on a ski hill” but for Lynch it was literally true. Her three older siblings were provincial- or national-team skiers (Sisters Lucy and Izzy were ski racers; brother Dennis was a ski-jumper, which planted the idea for Zoya.) Her parents, both ski racers from Ottawa, would tote her along on their own trips to the Rockies. “Mom and dad would drop her in the daycare early in the morning and be back to get her after last chair,” her sister Izzy once recalled.
By age two she was on skis herself.
By age five she was going off jumps.
By eight she’d joined a ski jumping team.
By 11 she was sailing off the 95-metre jump at Calgary Olympic Park, one of the world’s scariest ski-jump facilities. I’m talking here about the “normal” jump at COP. The “big” jump next to it is something else again. It leans into the teeth of the swirling prairie winds, and featuring a hill that drops sharply away beneath the skiers, leaving them massively exposed. That ski jump falls into the category of They don’t make ‘em like that anymore—with the addendum: The law wouldn’t allow it. “It was actually declared unsafe and closed before I was old enough to go off of it,” Lynch says. The big jump sits there to this day, like a fossilized elephant. “I guess they don’t want to blow it up,” Lynch says.
On the 95-metre jump she earned her wings. She’d sometimes log a dozen or more jumps a day. She got good. She discovered what ski jumping really is: “It’s golf for people who aren’t afraid to fly off a ski jump.” By which she means, it’s a mental test. There are so many little technical things to think about that it’s best not to think at all, just kind of empty your mind, be positive, and go for it. She learned to crash well, an art that consists mostly in not worrying about the next crash. She broke her wrist, her collarbone, some ribs in her back.
Even as she calculated her trajectories, she calculated her Trajectory. “I knew there was going to be an Olympics in 2010. And I knew that by then women’s ski jumping would be in it. I gave myself this very realistic timeline. I would be nineteen.”
By fifteen, she’d made the national team. Like her fast-skiing brother and sister before her, she attended the ultimate high school for jocks, Calgary’s National Sport School. The place is uniquely flexible to the needs of would-be Olympians. You pick up your homework assignments and boom, you hit the road for six weeks to compete.
There, in the same class, emerged and gelled a group of four musketeers – the first full women’s ski jump team Canada ever assembled. Katie Willis, Nata De Leeuw, Atsuko Tanaka, and Lynch studied together. They trainer together, rising in the predawn to jump, when the winds were still, and then hitting the gym as soon as school ended. They studied together. They struggled together with the relentless pressure to cut weight. The mantra among ski jumpers is “Fat Don’t Fly,” and so ski jumping, both men’s and women’s, has been plagued by anorexia and bulimia. “The coaches wouldn’t tell you outright to starve yourself,” she recalls. “But what they’d say was, ‘Do what you have to do to be this weight.’ And it would get to the point where you would reach your BMI and then you’d keep losing weight because it would help you fly farther.”
The girls were all the same age. They dreamed the same dream: an Olympics on home soil.
And then everybody woke up. And by then it was too late.
The team was in Steamboat Springs Colorado, competing, when they heard the news. The IOC – the International Olympic Committee— had excluded women’s ski jumping from the 2010 Games. This had been feared by all but not really expected. After all, at the previous meeting of the International Ski Federation, the members had voted in favour of including women’s ski jumping in the games, by a margin of 114-1.
Somebody approached the girls’ coach, Gregor Linsig, for a comment. “We’re bitter, pissed, silent, frustrated,” he said. Ski Jumping Canada chairman Brent Morrice said he felt “like he’d been kicked in the stomach.” It was December of 2006. The musketeers were 15 years old. Was it too late to fight this?
They tried. They took their case to the Canadian Human Rights Commission. They lobbied the IOC. Then a group of 15 competitive female ski jumpers sued VANOC—on the grounds that barring women was gender discrimination, and so contravened section 15 of Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms. It was a surgical intervention that risked killing the patient as it conquered the disease – because the women made the argument that if women weren’t allowed to compete, then men shouldn’t be, either. The fate of the whole sport seemed to hang in the balance.
In short: they lost. The appeal made it all the way to the BC Supreme Court, which refused to hear it. And that was the end of that.
The Olympics came. Zoya watched her classmates Justin Smith and Tristan Walker place 15th in the double luge. As a kind of consolation prize, two female jumpers—De Leeuw and Tanaka— were given the job of testing the ski jump in the morning, to make sure the track was in good shape for the men.
The whole thing had a terrible smell. The IOC had claimed the sport on the women’s side just wasn’t sufficiently developed – without a track record of world championships and just not enough skill internationally. And yet “ski cross” had been added, men’s and women’s.
One of the old IOC fossils, Gianfranco Kasper, had been quoted as saying he didn’t think women should ski jump because the sport “seems not to be appropriate for ladies from a medical point of view.” It was a remark beneath response, but it spoke less of sexism than of stale-datedness. As recently as the Eighties ski jumping was a sport you watched through your fingers. (“We were crash test dummies,” says Canadian ski-jumping coach Tadeusz Bafia, himself an Olympian from that era. “I crashed 80 times in a season.”) Kasper had just failed to notice that everything about the sport has changed, from the equipment to the contour of the hills to the machine-made grooves on the in-ramp that all-but prevent wipeouts like that guy’s on Wide World of Sports. It’s a dangerous sport still, but not a reckless one, and no more a threat to a woman’s ovaries than to some guy’s nads.
When the 2010 Vancouver Games opened, the Callaghan ski jump had been open more than two years, and hundreds upon hundreds of jumpers had soared from it. The record on the normal jump was held by American Lindsay Van—a woman.
It seemed clear why the women had been spurned. Not because they didn’t have a strong case, but because they had kicked the hornet’s nest. In an MSNBC documentary on the controversy, IOC member Dick Pound warned that one ought to be careful whom one pisses off with one’s allegations of gender discrimination. “The IOC may say, ‘Oh yeah, I remember them. They’re the ones that embarrassed us and caused us a lot of trouble in Vancouver. Maybe they should wait another four years or eight years.’”
Bummer. But really, when you’ve been waiting for something for your whole life, what’s another four years? For the teenage foursome from Calgary, the answer was: four years too many.
In 2008, Lynch burned out from the controversy, and from being sixteen years old, and fearing the worst, walked away from the sport.
The others would follow. Willis quit and moved to Montreal, where she’s now studying at McGill. DeLeeuw left for UBC’s Okanagan campus in Kelowna. Tanaka moved to Japan. (After nominally quitting, she is jumping again, and may compete for Japan in Sochi.) It’s as if the whole Canadian women’s ski-jump program was, overnight, wiped out by an IOC smart bomb.
Pity Tadeusz Bafia. He’s the new high-performance director for Nordic and ski jumping, and coach of the Canadian women’s ski jumping team. Honestly, there isn’t much to work with now. “I inherited one fifteen-year-old and six thirteen-year-olds,” he says. “That’s all we’ve got.” Bafia seems particularly pained by the loss of De Leeuw, whom he calls “the biggest talent on the planet,” a jumper who moves through the air over a ski jump like a fish moves through water,” better than Lindsay Van, even.
Bafia is like coach Buttermaker in the Bad News Bears movies, except fit and sober. But Buttermaker had Chico’s Bail Bonds behind his team; that at least paid for the uniforms. Bafia’s squad, ineligible for Olympic funding and all-but invisible to corporate sponsors, is on its own. Presumably there’ll be a lot of carpooling and bake sales. For the first time there actually is a women’s program, separate from the men’s. “They’ll still ski together, but the women will do physical training separately.”
Bafia used to coach the men’s ski-jumping program, which isn’t in a whole lot better shape. At the Olympics, Canada failed to qualify for the medal rounds. You had to have somebody in the top 40; the best Canadian was 44th. “But we were the heaviest team,” Bafia notes. “One guy was 15 kg over his body-mass index. That’s a joke. I mean, I’m being serious. But that’s a joke.”
It’s hard to figure out exactly how the jumpers are going to get better anytime soon. The facilities are … Where are the facilities again? Well, there’s Calgary’s. Unfortunately, the designers in their wisdom put a mogul hill right next to the ski jump, and every spring it channels floodwater right into the ski-jump runoff area and buries it under three and a half metres of mud. This takes most of the summer to clean up. Which leaves a six-week training window. How do you use a ski jump in the summer? You put a plastic mat down. It is not ideal.
That leaves one ski jump in Canada: the excellent new one in Callaghan Valley. But “we can’t even get on it,” Bafia says. After the Olympics, everyone but the guard dog decamped. There’s no permanent staff to run it, just a skeleton maintenance crew. “To open the jumps they need extra money,” Bafia says—which would come out of the vast profits of the Games, like the dough rolling in from the sale of those luxury condos in the athlete’s village. Plus which, by law there have to be paramedics on site when you use an Olympic-sized ski jump. Did anyone think of this when they built the jumps way out of town? Well, Bafia did. “We were bitching to organizers to put the jumps closer to Whistler”—where paramedics are thick on the ground. Plus, you’d there have “a human base to recruit kids to the sport.”
As you can see, Bafia notes, “There are a couple of obstacles to overcome before we take over the world.”
To lose a skilled ski jumper is like dropping a Faberge egg overboard. It’s something that has been painstakingingly created over a very long time. You can’t just, start, say, retraining lugers. “You have to start when you’re little,” Lynch says. “If I were to try to start now, no chance—you need to grow up jumping. All the Europeans started when they were like, three.” Ski jumpers can’t easily be repurposed from another sport, like ski-cross-ers. When you try to create a ski jumper later in life, you get something like Eddie “the Eagle” Edwards, the nearsighted plasterer from Gloucershire who worked up enough of a game to jump for Britain in the 1988 Olympics. Everyone agreed that Eddie embodied the true Olympic spirit. He finished fifty-eighth. (And the IOC quickly introduced an “Eddie the Eagle” rule that prevented pikers like Eddie from crashing the Games.)
So Bafia is pretty much starting from scratch. His current crop of tomatoes won’t have ripened by the 2014 Games in Sochi. Canada will send a team, for sure, but nobody’s expecting much till 2018. Bafia is starting afresh, with his eye on the distant horizon. He takes hope in a Calgary-based club called Altus, which is actually the world’s most popular ski jumping club. It has a “pretty successful recruiting program interested in high performance.” With luck it’ll be enough to produce a few more Zoyas and Natas and Katies, eight years from now.
As for Zoya 1.0, she seems to have recovered her equilibrium. She has become a demon free-skiier. “Basically what I’m doing every day is going out and searching for cliffs that I can jump off.” Could she imagine competing in another Olympics—maybe in some other discipline? Since she’s still so young? She shakes her head no. “I’m pretty anti-Olympics now. I guess you could say I’m slightly jaded.”
Bafia, the coach who has been left with the janitor’s work, betrays a mixture of emotions. “Ask them,” he says of the athletes who walked away. “Ask them why they quit. Sixteen-year-olds aren’t really the right age to make that decision. If they loved the sport so much, they should be coming back. There are hardly any Olympic champions under 20.”
At the same time, there is, unmistakably, some admiration for what The Whistler 15 did. Whatever course his own program charts now, it will follow a track laid down by Zoya Lynch and the others who fought their Pyrrhic fight.
“They definitely make a statement that pushed ski jumping forward,” Bafia says. “Their effort was not wasted.”
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