By Kristen Gelineau | The Associated Press
PYEONGCHANG, South Korea—They were the Cinderella story of the Sochi Olympics, the women ski jumpers who were finally allowed to compete in the Games after a years-long struggle for equality. They had survived a court battle, proved their athletic prowess and knocked back endless excuses for why they couldn’t compete—including the suggestion that their reproductive organs might somehow be obliterated upon landing.
And yet, four years later, amid the seismic cultural revolution in women’s rights, women ski jumpers at the Pyeongchang Olympics still find themselves fighting for parity. While the women are permitted to compete in one event—the normal hill—the men get three: the normal hill, the large hill and a team event.
“It’s like, ’Here, we’ll give you a little piece,’ and then, ’Go away, leave us alone,’” says Lindsey Van, the now-retired American ski jumper who helped lead a discrimination lawsuit to get women jumpers into the Games. “I still think that it’s an old boys’ club.”
In many ways, the fight for parity in ski jumping is emblematic of women’s fight for equal treatment across the Olympics: a process both plodding and frustrating to elite athletes repeatedly forced to prove they are worthy of competing at the top.
“Sports belongs to all of humanity,” says International Olympic Committee (IOC) Vice President Anita DeFrantz, who has waged a decades-long effort to boost gender equality in the Olympics. “There’s no reason to exclude women from any sport.”
‘ILLOGICAL’ DISPARITIES
THE IOC has indeed boosted opportunities for women and is aiming for an equal number of male and female competitors by 2020. Yet, gender equality remains elusive. Just four of the IOC’s 15 executive board members are women.
At Pyeongchang, women have six fewer medal events than men. In several sports, women are limited to shorter courses; In speed skating, for example, the longest course for men is 10,000 meters. For women, it’s just 5,000 meters.
And though many women ski jumpers have trained for years on the large hill, they are relegated at Pyeongchang to the smaller hill. Meanwhile, there are zero events for women in ski jumping’s sister sport, Nordic combined.
The disparities, DeFrantz says, are “absolutely illogical.”
DeFrantz won a bronze medal in rowing at the 1976 Olympics, the first year women rowers competed at the Games. At the time, the women were limited to a 1,000-meter course, while the men raced 2,000 meters—even though the women were trained to race 2,000. Women weren’t permitted to race the same distance as men until the 1988 Olympics in Seoul.
Why were women shut out of the longer course?
“I don’t know. It was all men who made the decision,” DeFrantz says. “And, sadly, that continues in some sports. And it’s just time for them, if not the women in the sport, to say ’OK, time’s up. We can do this.’”
THE FALLACY OF FRAGILITY
THE fallacy that women are too fragile for sports has existed since the dawn of the Games. In 1896 Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympic movement, stated: “No matter how toughened a sportswoman may be, her organism is not cut out to sustain certain shocks.”
Though science has debunked that notion over the centuries, such an excuse was used to keep women out of the Olympic marathon until 1984. And it played a role in the ski-jumping battle.
In 1991 the IOC ruled that both women and men must be allowed to participate in all future Olympic sports. But sports that existed prior to 1991—including ski jumping—were exempt.
Women jumpers began petitioning to join the Winter Olympics in 1998. The reasons they were given as to why they couldn’t were, at times, ludicrous. “Don’t forget, it’s like jumping down from, let’s say, about 2 meters on the ground about a thousand times a year, which seems not to be appropriate for ladies from a medical point of view,” International Ski Federation President Gian Franco Kasper said in a 2005 interview with National Public Radio.
In 2006 the IOC said there weren’t enough women jumpers from enough countries competing internationally to justify an Olympic event. At the time, though, there were more women from more countries competing internationally in ski jumping than in several other women’s Olympic sports.
Besides, the women argued, if the IOC allowed them to compete, more women would be motivated to take up the sport.
Many were left wondering if it all came down to a case of machismo. “It was the original extreme sport,” Van says. “And so if you all of a sudden add women to it, is it as extreme?”
Laura Hills, an expert in gender inequalities in sport at Brunel University London, says while few would admit it publicly, some still see sports as a man’s domain.
“There does seem to be a fear that, if women do all the same things, then men lose some of their prestige and power,” Hills says. “It’s kind a male badge of honor, isn’t it? As in, where do men go from there?”
Image credits: AP