Ski Jumping
http://www.wsjusa.com/ski-jumping-101
What is Ski Jumping exactly?
Ski jumping is a winter sport in which competitors aim to achieve the longest jump after descending from a specially designed ramp on their skis. Along with cross-country skiing, it constitutes the traditional group of Nordic skiing disciplines.
The ski jumping venue, commonly referred to as a hill, consists of the jumping ramp (in-run), take-off table, and landing hill. Each jump is evaluated according to the distance travelled and the style performed. The distance score is related to the construction point (also known as the K-point), which is a line drawn in the landing area and serves as a “target” for the competitors to reach. The score of each judge evaluating the style can reach a maximum of 20 points. The jumping technique has evolved over the years, from jumps with parallel skis with both arms pointing forwards, to the “V-style“, which is widely used today.
Ski jumping has been included at the Winter Olympics since 1924 and at the FIS Nordic World Ski Championships since 1925. Women’s participation in the sport began in the 1990s, while the first women’s event at the Olympics has been held in 2014.
Women’s participation
In January 1863 in Trysil, Norway, at that time 16 years old Norwegian Ingrid Olsdatter Vestby, became the first-ever known female ski jumper, who participated in the competition. Her distance is not recorded.
Women began competing at the high level during the 2004/5 Continental Cup season. International Ski Federation organized three women’s team events in this competition and so far the only team events in the history of women’s ski jumping.
Women’s made a premiere FIS Nordic World Ski Championships performance in 2009 in Liberec. The first world champion became American ski jumper Lindsey Van.
In the 2011–12 season, women competed for the first time in the World Cup. The first event was held on 3 December 2011 at Lysgårdsbakken at the normal hill in Lillehammer, Norway. The first-ever female World Cup winner was Sarah Hendrickson, who also became the inaugural women’s World Cup overall champion. Previously, women had only competed in Continental Cup seasons.
In 2006, the International Ski Federation proposed that women could compete at the 2010 Winter Olympics, but the proposal was rejected by the IOC because of the low number of women athletes and participating countries at the time.
A group of fifteen competitive female ski jumpers later filed a suit against the Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games on the grounds that it violated the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms since men were competing. The suit failed, with the judge ruling that the situation was not governed by the charter.
2014: Olympic Games
A further milestone was reached when women’s ski jumping was included as part of the 2014 Winter Olympics at a normal hill event. The first Olympic champion was Carina Vogt.
The Safety and Injuries:
Ski jumping is a combination of ski jumping and many hours of dry-land training. This requires both technical skills and core strength of the athlete, and both cute and overuse injuries are common. Ski jumping athletes are vulnerable to both acute injuries and overuse injuries. Acute injuries often occur from falls after a jump. Typical acute injuries are knee ligament injuries and concussions, which can happen in Nordic combined as well. These can be quite serious, and the athlete may have to take a long break from the sport.
A sprained ankle is among the most common injuries in ski jumping and can occur during off-snow training. Injuries to the head, shoulders, wrists and thumbs are also quite common. When an athlete has been injured once, there is an increased risk of it happening again. Overuse injuries mostly occur during dry-land training, for instance, tibia medial stress syndrome and jumper´s knee. The training involves repetitive jumping movements that can thereby cause these types of overuse injuries. Young athletes have an especially high risk.
Ski jumping athletes are also vulnerable to back pain. The level of pain is affected by various factors, such as monotonic training, sleep, rest, general well-being and motivation.
Common injuries
- ACL injury
- Concussion
- Back pain
- Jumper’s knee
- Medial tibial stress syndrome
- Ankle sprain
Believe it or not, Ski Jumping is one of the safest Ski Sports
“When you’re watching ski jumping, you think it’s high risk but it’s actually really low risk,” Dr. Tingan said. “Part of it has to do with the fact that you’re not physically competing with someone directly,” and potentially colliding against one another, as in downhill skiing. Six jumping fatalities have occurred in the United States during the past 50 years. The fatality rate for Nordic ski jumping, estimated to be roughly 12 fatalities/100,000 participants annually, appears to be within the range of fatality rates for other “risky” outdoor sports.
While the majority of women don’t compete in Ski Jumping, some do, but not enough.
So why did it take women’s ski jumping so long to become an official Olympic sport? It supposedly came down to the fact that there was a limited pool of athletes. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) said that simply not enough women were participating in competitive ski jumping.
Lindsey Van holds the record — among both men and women — for the longest jump off Whistler, British Columbia’s normal ski jump, built for the 2010 Vancouver Olympics. The 25-year-old skier trains six days a week, 11 months a year, and has been jumping for the past 19 years. But when the next games kick off on Feb. 12, the 2009 women’s ski-jumping world champion will be nowhere in sight. That’s because women aren’t allowed to ski jump in the Olympics.
It’s not for lack of trying. Female 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. In 1991 the IOC announced that all future Olympic sports must be open to both genders, but the rule didn’t apply to sports that already existed — and as one of the 16 original events in the inaugural Winter Games in 1924, ski jumping was definitely one of them.
“I don’t think there’s any discrimination going on,” says Joe Lamb, the U.S. ski-team representative for the International Ski Federation’s (FIS) ski-jumping committee. “It may seem like that, but there are hundreds of other issues at play.” Vancouver can accommodate only so many athletes, says Lamb, and whenever a new event is introduced, it limits the number of people able to participate in others. That, coupled with the IOC’s list of criteria that a sport must meet before it is accepted — a history of world championships and a sizable number of athletes participating worldwide — made the women’s ski jump an unlikely addition for 2010. And yet the IOC allowed Vancouver to add something called ski cross — a freestyle discipline in which multiple skiers races over bumps and jumps, like a snowy version of motocross — even though at the time of its application, the sport reportedly had fewer participants than women’s ski jumping.
The IOC declined interview requests for this article, but a spokesperson provided a written statement saying, “Women’s Ski Jumping does not reach the necessary technical criteria and as such does not yet warrant a place alongside other Olympic events.” Van isn’t sure what that means. “I would love to know what the technical merits are,” she says. “We have international competitions and our own championships. We meet all the technical requirements.”
Well, sort of. The IOC originally announced its decision to exclude women jumpers from the Vancouver Olympics back in 2006. At the time, a women’s world championship didn’t exist, and females had been participating in the FIS Continental Cup — a notch below a world championship — for only two years. The sport didn’t have very many high-profile, FIS-sanctioned competitions, but that too may have owed to gender bias. In 2005, Gian Franco Kasper, FIS president and a member of the IOC, said he didn’t think women should ski jump because the sport “seems not to be appropriate for ladies from a medical point of view.” By the time women’s ski jumping was included at a world-championship-level event in 2009, it was too late; Vancouver’s Olympic event schedule was already established.
A while ago, 100 women competed in FIS-sanctioned ski-jump competitions. There are at least 30 top-tier jumpers from 11 different nations — numbers equivalent to Olympic women’s bobsled stats — and by the time the 2014 Olympics roll around, several more world championships will have taken place. But a Vancouver shutout has severely hindered the sport’s ability to grow. Following the IOC’s announcement, a recession-weary U.S. Ski and Snowboard Association dropped the U.S. women’s ski-jump team, saying it could not afford to fund a non-Olympic event in this economy. Athletes have found their sponsorship opportunities limited, and Van worries that the sport’s low profile will lessen its potential appeal for the next generation of jumpers. “When people hear about ski jump, they just assume it’s in the Olympics, but once they realize it’s not, I don’t feel that we’re taken as seriously,” she says.
Ninety years ago, men’s ski jumping was included in the first modern-day Winter Olympic Games in Chamonix. Now, for the first time ever, women’s ski jumping will join the party.
For women’s ski jumping, the journey to the Olympics has been beset with challenges: lawsuits, gender inequality, and seemingly bogus rules that made it difficult for the sport to reach its current status.
Here’s the story of how it all went down – Let’s go back a bit
Years In The Making
Official attempts to include the sport in the Olympics were first made for the 1998 games in Nagano. Ski jumping was the only Winter Olympic sport to remain men-only, aside from the Nordic combined, which also includes ski jumping.
The fact that the sport remained men’s‑only is somewhat bizarre, considering that in 1991, the IOC decided that all future sports to be added to the Olympics must be open to both men and women. Since ski jumping had been an Olympic sport since 1924, it grandfathered this rule.
“Diluting” The Olympic Medal
So why did it take women’s ski jumping so long to become an official Olympic sport? It supposedly came down to the fact that there was a limited pool of athletes.
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) said that simply not enough women were participating in competitive ski jumping. Fewer than 100 athletes were competing in women’s ski jump, compared to hundreds of thousands of athletes in many other sports. This small pool of competitors allegedly meant that it would be somewhat easy to get a medal—and the IOC did not want to dilute the importance of an Olympic medal.
But Does That Argument Hold Up?
Eyebrows were raised when women’s ski cross became an official Olympic sport in 2010—this was a newer sport that, according to many, had fewer participants and representation from fewer countries than women’s ski jumping. Of course, being added after 1991—the year of the implementation of the rule that all sports added to the Olympics must be open to men and women—ski cross was required to include a women’s competition.
A Close Call In 2006
In 2006, the International Ski Federation recommended to the IOC, with a vote of 114–1, that women’s ski jumping be included in the Winter Olympics. Despite the loud and clear message, the IOC neglected to include it in the games.
At that time, there were 83 athletes from 14 different countries competing in women’s ski jumping—more athletes from more countries than four other Winter Olympic sports. So much for “diluting” the medals!
Fine Margins
interestingly, ski jumping is one of the few sports for which, at an elite level, men and women perform on relatively level playing fields. The difference between the two gender’s athletic capabilities is considered to be minimal.
More Controversy
In 2005, Gian Franco Kasper, president of the FIS (International Ski Federation) who was also a member of the IOC made a comment that ski jumping was not an appropriate sport for women “from a medical point of view.” “Don’t forget,” he said, “it’s like jumping down from, let’s say, about two meters on the ground about a thousand times per year, which seems not to be appropriate for ladies from a medical point of view.”
Needless to say, this comment ruffled more than a few feathers. The implied message that women’s bodies couldn’t handle ski jumping—despite the fact that they had been doing so for a hundred years—was an unfounded statement that reminded many of the attitude toward women marathoners in the 1970s and 1980s.
Taking It To Court
When women’s ski jumping failed to make the roster for the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, a group of female ski jumpers from five different countries sued VANOC (the Vancouver Organizing Committee) on grounds that the committee was violating the ban on gender discrimination in Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedom. Ultimately, they were unsuccessful. VANOC was found to simply be enforcing the IOC’s decision and did not have the authority to overturn those decisions.
April 6, 2011
On this fated day, the IOC announced that women’s ski jumping would be included in the 2014 Olympic Games in Sochi. This was a major victory for the sport, but the battle isn’t entirely over: the women will be competing in one event (normal hill) versus the three events in which the men compete (normal hill, large hill and team).
Meet Lindsey Van
If you’re reading up on women’s ski jumping, you won’t go without coming across the name Lindsey Van. Lindsey is a U.S. athlete who holds the record for the longest jump off the Whistler, BC normal ski jump, which was part of the 2010 Olympics. That’s not just the women’s record—that’s the record for both women and men.
Van started off as the only female playing amongst the boys at the ripe age of 8 years old in Park City, Utah. Many say she spearheaded the sport for females. Soon, other young women in Park City began to join in on the training. A generation of elite athletes was born, many of whom will be participating in the 2014 Olympics.
Ultimately women’s ski jumping was admitted to the 2014 Games in Sochi, not long after a lawsuit was filed against the organizers of the preceding Games, in Vancouver, by 15 of the most accomplished female jumpers in the world, including Van. (At the time, Van held the record for jumpers of any gender on the Vancouver Olympic hill.) The tenacious battle for inclusion shone a brighter light on the sport. There was a daily swirl of reporters around the women as they trained. For decades, the most familiar stories in ski jumping were about the spectacular or laughable failures of men who maybe shouldn’t have been competing in the first place. For the women, the entire story was about the fight to take off.
By now, the best American jumper and emerging face of the sport is widely acknowledged to be Sarah Hendrickson, a 23-year-old from Park City, Utah. After rebounding from a catastrophic knee injury four years ago, Hendrickson now has a not-inconceivable shot at winning a medal in Pyeongchang and has sponsorships from Red Bull and Nike. Both are unusual circumstances for an American ski jumper. Nearly a million people watched her and the other Americans compete in this year’s Olympic ski-jumping trials on NBC in December. It was the second-most-watched event of all the Olympic trials the network broadcast. And it was a Sunday to boot; there was football happening.
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 humanity,” says International Olympic Committee 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.”
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.”
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 kinda male badge of honor, isn’t it? As in, where do men go from there?”
Next Stop: Court
Van and the other women jumpers were wondering where they could go themselves. The answer, they decided, was to the court.
In 2008, Van and a group of women jumpers from five countries sued the Vancouver Organizing Committee for the right to compete in the 2010 Vancouver Games.
While their male peers got to focus on training, the women arranged court dates and media interviews about sexism around their practice time. American jumper Jessica Jerome remembers being one week away from competition in Europe and having to squeeze in a court appearance.
“I was in a hotel room in Vancouver putting makeup on and a collared shirt so I could go sit in a courtroom and I was pissed,” Jerome says. “All I want to do is just be an athlete, and I was envious of everybody else who never had to deal with that. All they ever had to do was train hard and work hard and focus on their own performance … they had this path already set up. And we didn’t.”
Though the lawsuit ultimately failed, the IOC finally agreed amid an avalanche of negative publicity to add one women’s ski jumping event — the normal hill — to the Sochi program.
The women had hoped to be allowed to compete in all three jumping events by Pyeongchang. That has not happened.
As for Nordic combined, a blend of ski jumping and cross-country, those fighting for gender equality have welcomed some recent developments: Women competed in a Nordic combined U.S. national championships in October, and the first women’s Nordic combined Continental Cup was held.
True Parity: When?
The gender gap stretches beyond the Olympics. Ski jumping, like many sports, pays men far more than women.
Under the official rules of the International Ski Federation, which sets the minimum amount of prize money for the World Cup, the first-place male jumper gets more than three times what the winning woman receives. The ski federation’s rules also stipulate that men receive “pocket money”; no such provision exists for women. And men receive up to four times more travel reimbursement money than women.
“The prize money discrepancy is absurd in this day and age,” says Laura Sankey, president of Women’s Ski Jumping USA. “An elite ski jumper, whether a man or a woman, dedicates themselves to being their best and should be compensated equally.”
Jenny Wiedeke, a ski federation spokeswoman, says the group hopes to get women equal prize money in future seasons, though she said there is no timeline.
“Essentially the reason for the discrepancy is due to the difference in sponsorship, TV and spectator revenue for the organizers, making it difficult for them to support the men’s prize money payments for the ladies’ competitions while staying within their budgets,” Wiedeke said by e-mail. “The ladies’ tour is still quite new and still establishing itself in the above areas.”
With equal economics, the women’s tour could grow, bringing in more spectators, sponsors and revenue. As it stands, women must essentially fund themselves.
Whether women finally achieve true parity in the sport depends on how hard they keep pushing, says Van, who looks back on her legacy of fighting for equality with pride in the outcome and frustration that she had to fight at all.
“It’s unfortunate that it takes that much energy from so many people to do the right thing,” she says. “It’s kind of like this slow process. But slow is better than none.”
Ringquist is a US Olympic ski jumper who made her Olympic debut at the XXIII Winter Games in PyeongChang, South Korea. The opinions in this article belong to her.
It was 2002, I was 12 years old, and the Olympics were in my hometown: Park City, Utah. My eyes were glued to the ski jumpers. But it did not occur to me that there were no women competing in the events.
Women had been petitioning the International Olympic Committee to qualify and compete in ski jumping events for years, but the sport was restricted to men.
But when all you’ve ever dreamed of is competing in the Olympics, nothing will stand in your way. So I trained, campaigned and fought. And nine years later, the IOC acquiesced.
Still, the battle for gender equality was far from over. Just because women were now allowed to compete in Olympic ski jumping didn’t mean they could afford to.
To make it to the qualifying events for the 2014 Sochi games in Russia, my family shed a lot of cash. I mean, a lot of cash. Thousands upon thousands of dollars.
At elite levels of all sports, it’s not uncommon for families to spend more than $20,000 per year. While funding and prize money is out there, that money disproportionately benefits male athletes.
Take the FIFA World Cup. In 2015, the US Women’s National Team took home $2 million for winning the World Cup, while Germany’s men’s team took home $35 million for winning the 2014 World Cup. The US men’s team finished in 11th place in 2014 with $9 million — four times as much as the 2015 women’s championship team.
Even when I thought I’d reach a point in my career where I’d finally have access to funding, I was informed that some funding for the US Women’s Ski Jumping team had fallen through. Only the top three women on the team would receive money. So, unless I performed the next competition at the highest possible level, I would be cut off for the rest of the season.
I felt like I had face-planted into the icy snow. The money should have been there. Yet it wasn’t. And there was no way I could continue to pursue this goal without a miraculously fuller checking account.
Qualifying for the Olympics isn’t just about talent and skill and dedication. It’s also — sometimes even more so — about money.
In short, sports change lives. This was most evident to me this February at the PyeongChang games, 16 years after watching those ski jumpers in Park City. At 28, I achieved my ultimate goal of becoming an Olympian, and I did not need to medal to know that I’d made it. But what now?
I’m done. I can no longer continue to fund another Olympic pursuit.
Even while putting three separate paychecks toward ski jumping, I barely scraped by. If it weren’t for additional funding through organizations like 1,000 Dreams Fund, which supported my journey last fall, I don’t know if I could have made it all the way to the Olympics.
If we want young girls to reap the immeasurable benefits of sports — just as boys do — competitive sports need to be financially accessible.
So, let’s get the girls out onto the playing field. I’ve achieved my Olympic dream. Now I want to see more girls achieve theirs.
A little more information:
Higher. Stronger. Faster. To win at the Olympics these are the prerequisites. Oh yeah, one more thing: If you’re a ski jumper, females need not apply.
Ski jumping has been an Olympic event for men since the first Olympic Winter Games in 1924 in Chamonix, France. For the past decade, a contingent of elite women jumpers have been fighting for inclusion, arguing that the IOC’s Olympic charter mission statement which reads, in part, “to encourage and support the promotion of women in sport at all levels and in all structures with a view to implementing the principle of equality of men and women,” guarantees their rightful place at the Olympics.
The IOC contends that women’s ski jumping doesn’t have a broad enough global appeal and lacks sufficient international participation to merit inclusion at the Olympics. We asked Alan Johnson, director and coach for the men’s project X U.S. Ski Jumping team, for his take on what has become a hot-button topic at these Winter Games. Here are the questions and his answers:
What is the justification for not allowing women ski jumpers to compete at the Olympics?
The IOC says it has to do with a lack of competitiveness, but the numbers don’t add up. If you compare women’s ski cross to women’s ski jumping, it looks like this: This season [2009-10] there are eight ski cross International Ski Federation (FIS) events, with an average of 18 competitors representing seven different nations; there are 12 ski jumping FIS events with an average of 45 competitors representing 12 nations. So you must ask yourself if the IOC denied ladies ski jumping based on lack of numbers and development of the sport on the same day they invited in ladies ski cross, how can this be justified when skier cross is far less developed than ski jumping? It’s not even close.
What is the biggest difference between men’s and women’s ski jumping?
From a technical standpoint, nothing is different. They both use the same techniques as far as actual jumping and training go. From a physical standpoint, men are stronger and more powerful, thus they can reach the optimal length jump with a lower in-run speed. Additionally, women’s physiques are such that their in-run speeds will naturally be lower from the same starting point. What does it all mean? In order for a woman to jump to the same length as a man, she will need to start approximately 7-9 gates higher in the in-run.
In 2005 Gian-Franco Kasper, president of the International Ski Federation said ski jumping is detrimental to a woman’s reproductive system. Are there inherent physical dangers for women ski jumpers specifically? No, the dangers for men and women are the same. Statistically, ski jumping is far safer than alpine skiing. There are no physical attributes that make it more dangerous for a woman than a man.
In May 2009, the U.S. Ski Federation stopped funding women ski jumpers. How does the sponsorship for men compare to women in the sport?
Presently, there are approximately five or six women jumpers who have sponsors and make money above and beyond their national program support — for example, equipment, room, board, travel, etc. Are there sponsors who support men and not women? Naturally, there are. Hundreds of men jumpers earn money from sponsorship deals. Clearly, if women were included in the Olympics, there would be additional avenues to earn sponsorship money for them, too.
Is women’s ski jumping a viable sport outside the sphere of Olympic competition?
Since it is completely outside the realm of Olympic competition and is comparatively more successful than a number of other women’s sports inside the Olympic realm, the answer would have to be yes. Women’s ski jumping is significantly more developed than women’s luge, bobsled and skeleton. Again, the numbers provided by the individual sports federations show that more women from more nations compete in ski jumping, yet these other sports have been admitted to the Olympics.
Whilst the obvious dangers in the sport for both men and women, discrimination, sexism, and racism are always here to stay.
Also noted is the fact that women, physically, are not as strong or resilient as men.
Women’s skiing events are hardly aired on television and the prize money is way below what the men are earning.
Also when women injure themselves, they will often hear comments of “I told you, women can’t take the pressure or that’s why women shouldn’t ski jump. They are much weaker than men so they can’t do the distance”
Companies are very reluctant to sponsor women in Ski jumping, with the trepidation that women will badly injure themselves and this will negatively affect the company’s reputations.
There is very little marketing supporting women in Ski jumping. Women very rarely are found to be marketable, in that, the men get all the credit.
You will very rarely find women in ski jumping, in magazines, on television, on social media, in branded clothing and they also have difficulty finding the right fitting equipment. Sports apparel for women in ski jumping is difficult to find, so a lot of women are having to take men’s equipment and size them accordingly to fit themselves.
Sadly, you will find audiences of men and women and competitors, mocking, ridiculing, swearing, shaming, putting women down and even spitting on them.
So all of this makes it very difficult for women to enter this arena.
EQUIPMENT
Suggested manufacturers, accessories and products for Ski Equipment – just to name a few:
South African suppliers:
If you have the itch, go for its exhilarating and the surroundings are spectacular!
When you are ready to take on that slope or just to feel the snow on your face, please take a moment and bow for people that are disabled, that cannot take part in such sports.
To all you avid gamers out there. Here are a few Ski games for you to enjoy!
Steep
Ski Jumping VR
Alpine Ski Racing
Alpine Skiing
Winter Sports
Ski Air Mix
Steep road to the Olympics
Snow
Please note: I do not take any responsibility for an accident, disability, death, public liability, third party, medical costs, destruction of property, damages to self or others, destruction of all equipment, disability, personal liability, general liability, self-harm, suicide, harm to livestock, harm to animals, harm to children and intentional bodily harm, for using any of the listed products and suppliers. Please consult with the manufacturers and instructors, when buying the equipment that is suitable for you.
If you wish to learn more about this sport and its history, just pop me a mail and I will send the information to you: info@tanyasworldofsports.co.za
When you are ready to take on those mounts, Please take a moment and bow to people that are disabled, that cannot take part in such sports.
My views, comments and content are strictly are of my own opinion and research and are not governed or influenced by any marketing of companies or brands. It is of my own free will to mention companies and brands that supply sporting equipment pertaining to the sport in the discussion.
