It probably seems like a small thing to many, but women can compete (and risk serious injury) in every Winter Olympic sport from Ice Hockey to Downhill Skiing to Curling, but for two: Nordic Combined (which includes ski jumping and cross country skiing) and Ski Jumping. One has to ask why.
The FIS, the governing international federation for ski jumping holds ski jumping competitions for women and voted in 2006 by 104-1 to allow women to compete in the Olympics. Sixteen countries have female competitors, and last year for the first time ever the FIS sanctioned the women to compete at the World Championships held at Liberac in the Czech Republic. Lindsey Van of America won that contest. She also holds the record for the longest ski jump, man or woma,n at the ski jumping facility at Whistler Mountain, the same facility the men are using for their ski jumping competitions at the Vancouver Olympics.
That’s right, she beat the boys. But she and her fellow competitors couldn’t beat the International Olympic Committee which summarily rejected the recommendation of the FIS and refused to allow women to compete at Vancouver. Several elite female ski jumpers, better athletes than most men, and certainly based on Van’s feat at Whistler the equal of the elite men jumpers, filed suit in the Canadian Courts based on Canadian law that prohibits discrimination against women. Unfortunately, they were slapped down by those judicial authorities who upheld the right of the IOC to exclude women ski jumpers from the most famous, most prestigious international sports competition in the world:
Women ski jumpers have petitioned to join every Winter Olympics since Nagano in 1998, and each time they have been denied by the International Olympics Committee (IOC). In fact, ski jumping is the only Olympic discipline to remain men-only. (Technically, Nordic combined is also limited to males, but that’s because it includes ski jumping.) […]
[Y]et the IOC allowed Vancouver to add something called ski cross – a freestyle discipline in which multiple skiers race over bumps and jumps, like a snowy version of motor cross – even though at the time of its application the sport reportedly had fewer participants than women’s ski jump. […]
In April 2009, Van and nine other female jumpers sued the Vancouver Organizing Committee (VANOC) for violating the ban on gender discrimination in Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The British Columbia Supreme Court ruled that although the IOC’s decision did qualify as gender discrimination, as an international organization they were not required to obey Canada’s laws and that VANOC had no authority to tell them which sports they could and could not include. “I don’t know about that,” says [US FIS representative] Joe Lamb. “Ladies’ bobsled got into [the 2002 Olympics in] Salt Lake because enough people on the organizing committee pressured the IOC to push it through.” Whether or not that’s true – only the IOC knows, and they aren’t talking – it doesn’t change the court ruling.
Personally, I feel saddened that these women aren’t getting the right to compete on sport’s greatest stage, the Olympics, the exact same opportunity that women alpine skiers, bobsledders, luge competitors, freestyle skiers, et al. are enjoying in Vancouver. I have a daughter who is an athlete (volleyball). If she reaches the highest level of her sport she can get a college scholarship and represent her country at the Olympics.
Yet women ski jumpers are denied that right to compete by an organization run by — well who does run them? It certainly isn’t the competitors. It includes a large number of male aristocrats for one thing, and few if any women. And we have the courts of countries like Canada essentially giving them a free pass on their decisions to exclude women sports, literally saying the IOC and its members are above the laws that the rest of us must follow.
Yet, for all their talk about the Olympic ideals, aren’t they just another multi-million dollar business that sells sponsorships and the right to hold these competitions to the highest corporate and governmental bidders? This ugly prejudicial exclusion of women ski jumpers from the Olympics has left a bad taste in my mouth.
In its own way it represents all that is wrong with our society in the 21st Century, where the rich and powerful can decide, despite the ideals of freedom and equality to which they pay lip service, who holds the power to make the decisions that affect our lives and who do not, whether in sports, in politics, in basic things like who may marry, and, in the US of A, who has the right to live (those who can afford to pay for health care, obviously) and who must suffer and die (i.e., those who cannot pay the outrageous cost of health care).
What happened to the women ski jumpers is a small injustice, I grant you, in the great scheme of things, but small injustices add up. So, I’m not asking you to boycott watching the Olympics or buying the products of those who paid for the privilege to hawk their wares to you during the commercials NBC broadcasts. But if you decide to stop watching them on the TV to send a message to their corporate sponsors I won’t stop you. Because nothing changes in this world of ours unless individuals take action, one by one, day after day, year after year, to effect that change.