Women’s Ski Jumping
One of the more recent controversies in the Olympics (and there have been plenty) involve women’s ski jumping. There are two separate disciplines, ski jumping and nordic combined, that involve ski jumping, and women are excluded from both of them. My question is… why?
Olympic rules require that any new event added to the Olympics must include women. That’s why when they added snowboardcross, or ski cross, they have both women’s and men’s events. Double’s luge has technically been coed since 1992. These old rules don’t require that the IOC add women’s events to already existing disciplines, like ski jumping.
Women have tried to get ski jumping added since 1998. For 2010, the ski jumpers even tried, unsuccessfully, to force inclusion. Their request was shot down.
Gian Franco Kasper, IOC member and president of the International Ski Federation (FIS), was quoted as saying in 1995 that ski jumping “seems not to be appropriate for ladies from a medical point of view.” I believe that a similar argument was made for running the 800 meter competition… after the 800 meter competition in the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics, some of the women dropped to the ground from exhaustion. Doctors were quoted saying that women who competed in such events would “become old too soon”. After that event, all races longer than 200 meters were banned until 1960.
Will we see women’s ski jumping in the 2014 Sochi Olympics? So far, I haven’t seen anything to suggest it. There currently isn’t a world cup competition for women’s ski jumping, only a continental cup. I do think that there’s a good chance that it will be included in the 2018 Olympics, and by 2022, I’d be surprised if it was not included. But that will probably be too late for today’s ski jumpers.
More information on women’s ski jumpers can be found at Time.com. For information about the 1928 Amsterdam Race, see The Complete Book of the Olympics, 2008 Edition
February 26th, 2010 at 10:40 pm
De dуnde eres? їEs un secreto? :)
Gracias
Truden
March 2nd, 2010 at 8:32 am
Woo Hoo!! World Cup! It’s going to be incredible this year!
March 5th, 2010 at 12:46 am
Great Blog! I have a similar site, and get a lot of spam. Do you face such problems? Can you please recommend some steps I take to combat spam. Thanks.
March 5th, 2010 at 1:55 am
So far, I’m not getting a huge amount of visitors (although more than my other site). I do get some spam, mostly people with comments that look innocuous but they’re just posting to get their links out. I let those by on a case-by-case basis… sometimes just deleting the link they want to get out.
Akismet works well. I use that on my other site, and I’ll be installing that here once I start getting too much spam. If a particular post is causing a lot of spam, you can always turn off comments for that particular link.