Parity for sport: the IOC is catching up: women's ski jumping an Olympic sport

From the New York Times:

April 6, 2011
After Long Fight for Inclusion, Women’s Ski Jumping Gains Olympic Status
By KATIE THOMAS

The International Olympic Committee announced Wednesday that it would add women’s ski jumping to the program for the Sochi Games in 2014, a victory for athletes who had fought for inclusion for years.

Ski jumping and Nordic combined, which includes ski jumping, were the only sports in the Winter or Summer Games that did not offer events for women. Female ski jumpers had gone so far as to file a lawsuit to compete at the 2010 Vancouver Games; it went all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada, which refused to hear an appeal.

“It hasn’t sunk in yet,” said Abby Hughes, who listened to the announcement in Park City, Utah, with six other members of the United States ski jumping team. “It’s definitely a huge relief to actually be able to have the title of the Olympics for the sport.”

The I.O.C. had ruled that women’s ski jumping had too few elite competitors to qualify for the Olympics. But critics charged that the exclusion was based on outdated ideas about the abilities of female athletes, made all the more puzzling by the fact that traditionally male Olympic sports like wrestling and boxing had recently welcomed women.

In 2005, Gian Franco Kasper, the president of the International Ski Federation, told an NPR reporter that ski jumping “seems not to be appropriate for ladies from a medical point of view.”

Vic Method, vice president of Women’s Ski Jumping USA, the foundation that led the fight to gain Olympic status for the sport, said, “When you really look at this, this is a win for equality for women.”

Christophe Dubi, the I.O.C.’s sports director, said in a London news conference that officials had been impressed with the level of competition among female ski jumpers last month at the Nordic world championships in Oslo. “It was really critical, and what we’d seen there was extremely positive,” Dubi said.

He added that the top 30 competitors jumped far better than at the 2009 world championships, and they came from 13 countries, which indicated a depth of field. “There is much more quality than there was two years ago,” Dubi said.

In addition to women’s ski jumping, the committee also approved ski halfpipe, a team event in figure skating, a luge team relay and a mixed relay in biathlon. The committee decided to postpone its decision on five other events, including ski slopestyle and snowboard slopestyle, for another several weeks.

Now that women are allowed to jump in the Olympics, “it will absolutely grow the sport by leaps and bounds,” said Deedee Corradini, the president of the women’s ski jumping foundation and the former mayor of Salt Lake City. “It was always a chicken-and-egg problem. Once the girls know that they’re in the Olympics, more and more want the opportunity to do better.”

Corradini said their work was not done. Women will still not jump in a team event or on the large hill during the Olympics. And Nordic combined, which consists of cross-country skiing and jumping, does not allow women.

“Now that we can jump, that should be something that should follow,” she said.