MPR’s Laura Yuen reports on female ski jumpers who are pressuring the International Olympic Committee to create a women's event in the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver. Ski jumping is the only event in the Winter Olympics that excludes female athletes.
ANNOUNCER: 26, Michaela Arneson.
LAURA YUEN: If there is a future for women's ski jumping, you'll find it at the top of the steepest ski hill in the eastern suburb of Maplewood. The 46-meter ramp at the St. Paul Ski Club looks like a forbidding wooden roller coaster. 12-year-old girls sporting Spandex and helmets swoop down the hill and launch into the air like miniature stunt women.
As Karin Friberg sees it, ski jumping has more to do with physics than flair.
KARIN FRIBERG: Because you're doing something with your body that your body is telling you not to do.
LAURA YUEN: At 103 pounds, Friberg is the state's reigning queen of ski jumping. But tonight, the 18-year-old from Roseville is just a spectator in a sherpa hat, rooting for the younger athletes in the minus 6-degree cold. Friberg recently placed 29th in the Junior World Championships. While she isn't ready to compete at the Olympic level, she could have a shot in 2014 or future years, that is, if the powers that be ever open the event to women. The littler athletes, like 12-year-old Michaela Arneson, dream of that day. But Michaela says even she knows not to get carried away.
MICHAELA ARNESON: Sometimes people tell me, do you want to go to the Olympics someday? And I say, well, right now, I really can't because they don't let girls in the Olympics for ski jumping.
LAURA YUEN: Ski jumping used to be as Minnesotan as ice fishing. Norwegian immigrants brought the sport to Midwestern hilltops in the 1800s. Retired Olympic ski jumper Kip Sundgaard says Minnesota helped put American ski jumping on the map. That was before the state became obsessed with hockey.
KIP SUNDGAARD: The Balfanzes, the Kotlareks, Adrian Watt from Duluth. Anybody that was anybody in ski jumping in the US pretty much was from Minnesota.
LAURA YUEN: Over the years, ski jumpers passed their love for the sport onto their sons, as well as their daughters. And parents like John Lyons are outraged by what they consider Olympic-level chauvinism.
JOHN LYONS: I've watched several girls grow up in this sport with the same dreams and aspirations that the boys have, and they're denied that privilege. I think there's a couple of old farts in charge over there that ought to be put out in the barn.
LAURA YUEN: A spokeswoman with the International Olympic Committee told NPR in an email that the IOC stands by its position that there are too few women jumping at the elite levels to justify having their own event. The IOC president recently told reporters that creating a women's event would dilute the Olympic medal standard. But supporters of women's ski jumping disagree, saying they have more than 150 active competitors around the world.
Women's ski jumping pioneer Karla Keck of Wisconsin sees herself in the younger girls she now coaches. Keck grew up competing head to head with the boys. She used to think that her jumps would serve as proof that women could jump at the Olympic level. But Keck says opponents would come up with one excuse after another to keep women out, like the one about those hard landings and how they could hurt women's bodies.
KARLA KECK: Damaged their ovaries because they're hollow inside type of a statement.
LAURA YUEN: Now 32, Keck is developing the sport among younger women who have a chance of one day going for the gold. But she says it's heartbreaking to see elite athletes work so hard for a mere maybe.
KARLA KECK: It is really hard to get yourself ready to do everything it takes to train, to be an Olympic athlete and to keep yourself at that level, and then have somebody say, no, not this year. You're not going to be a part of this Olympics.
LAURA YUEN: She's still holding out hope that there's enough time for the IOC to change its mind. In Canada, women ski jumpers have filed a complaint with the country's human rights commission, citing gender discrimination. At the St. Paul Ski Club, the young jumpers say that the decision to bar women from the Olympics just isn't fair. But for now, they'll just focus on having fun and making each jump better than their last. Laura Yuen, Minnesota Public Radio news, Maplewood.
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