WHISTLER, British Columbia -- Ski jumping has a lot going for it. There's conflict (Austria and Switzerland are clashing over Simon Ammann's bindings), athletes flying long distances, and dominant stars (Ammann, again). What it doesn't have, unlike all other Olympic events, is women.
Since 1991, all new Olympic sports must be open to both genders, but ski jumping is an odd case. The sport has been in the winter games from the beginning (1924) and got a grandfather clause when the gender rule was established. Women have petitioned unsuccessfully to get into the games since 1998.
The basic line from the International Olympic Committee is that there aren't enough competing nations or qualifying athletes to stage women's ski jumping, while the other side says it is simple discrimination.
The IOC hasn't done itself any favors in the argument, mainly denying any discrimination and staying mum about anything else. The notable exception has been Gian-Franco Kasper, president of the International Ski Federation and a member of the IOC, who said in 2005 that he didn't think women should ski jump because the sport "seems not to be appropriate for ladies from a medical point of view." The quote lives on five years later, in part because of stories like this one.
The women have made some headway in the courts, but the bottom line was that the Canadian courts passed, saying they didn't have jurisdiction over the IOC.
I haven't found any reports that looked at an actual women's ski jumping competition, it being much easier to write the discrimination story and proclaim the hill to be the last bastion of the European male.
Let's fix that. Here is a link to a PDF document of last year's women's world championship, sanctioned by the FIS and held in Liberec, Czech Republic.
There were 36 competitors from 13 countries, so that would seem to answer to the IOC's demand for a larger pool of talent. Ten of those were 15 or younger, however. How competitive was the event? I plotted all the jumps from the world championship (67 data points) alongside the men's normal hill competition at this year's Olympics (80 data points).
As you can imagine from a nascent sport, the spread from top to bottom is quite wide. The difference between the men and women can most probably be explained by the relative ages of the sports. The safe assumption is that the back half of the women's competition will eventually get closer to the top (and that younger competitors will not be so prevalent).
Things look to be opening up in 2012. The inaugural Winter Youth Olympics will include women's ski jumping, and women's boxing will be on the summer schedule.
