All About Ski Jumping
Ah ski jumping. Ski jumping is the most fantastical of the sports that are just extreme versions of what we did in the snow when we were kids. I remember building little ramps at the bottom of our sledding or skiing hills so that I could fly over the bump at full speed and for a second, just a second, feel like I was flying. Ski jumping is just like this except the hill is a looming man-made ramp, the bump is the specially designed bottom part of the ramp that sling-shots the skier into the air, and the second in flight extends to what feels like around ten seconds.
How Does Ski Jumping Work?
Ski jumping involves four separate actions: the descent down the ramp, the launch, the flight, and the landing. I just spent about ten minutes trying to find a site somewhere that has the height of the ramp to no avail. Which seems silly because it’s clearly impressive. It definitely looks like it’s somewhere between 10 and 15 stories tall. Skiers follow two ridged trails for their skis down the ramp and duck down to pick up as much speed as possible. At the bottom, the ramp curves up to launch them into the air. To encourage this inevitable physical feat, the jumpers lean forward towards the jump. This gets them into their flying position as quickly as possible — leaning forward, almost parallel to their over-wide skis, with hose skis in a open V. They hold this position as still and for as long as possible. When pesky gravity seems to be about to catch up to them, they straighten up and land in a position that looks like they are about to kiss someone’s hand in an old-fashioned movie. You know what I mean, right? One knee down, truck straight up.
Each hill has a “K point” which is the minimally acceptable landing spot. For normal hills this is around 95 meters down the hill. On large hills it’s more like 125 meters. Jumpers get 60 points for jumping as far as the K point. For each meter more or less that they jump they are awarded or penalized 1.8 points. (Don’t ask me why it’s not an integer, I didn’t make this stuff up.) There are also five judges looking at style and form. They can award up to 20 additional points and the top and bottom judges scores are thrown out before the middle three scores are added to the distance score.
Why do People Like Watching Ski Jumping?
If there’s a more obvious example of enjoying to watch people do something which it doesn’t seem like people were designed to do than ski jumping, I don’t know what it is. THESE ATHLETES ARE FLYING!! Without an airplane! It’s just so cool.
What are the Different Ski Jumping Events?
Ski jumping has three different events in the Olympics. There are two individual events, the Normal Hill and the Large Hill. The large hill is, um, larger. There’s also a team event where teams of four jumpers compete for the best overall score. The individual events consist of a practice jump and then two jumps that count and the team event consists of eight jumps, two for each team-member.
How Dangerous is Ski Jumping
It’s so dangerous. The jumpers are moving really, really fast down that narrow jump ramp. Although injuries at the launch are thankfully somewhat rare, they are usually pretty catastrophic when they happen. More common are jumps that go “a little” wrong and have the jumper hit the ground wrong. Injuries during the landing are very common and still quite damaging. More on this in the gender section.
What’s the State of Gender Equality in Olympic Ski Jumping
2014 is the first Olympics to include women’s Ski Jumping. Of the four events this year, only one is a women’s event. There is a men’s large hill, a men’s normal hill, and a men’s team medal, and only a women’s normal hill one. This is a little hard to believe given the fact that the first recorded women’s ski jump was in 1863, over a 150 years ago! Women ski jumpers had to fight to even get this far. After the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, a group of Canadian ski jumpers sued Canada claiming they were being discriminated against. As often seems to happen, they lost the legal battle but won the actual battle and got their event added to this edition of the Olympics.
There does seem to be a real difference in how men and women jump. Women need to start proportionally higher on the normal hill to pick up the speed necessary to hit the K point of the hill. They also seem to be getting injured at a disproportionate rate. Wikipedia has a devastating list of serious injuries to eight of the “top” female ski jumpers just in the year after the IOC accepted them into the Olympics. I’m skeptical because this is just the kind of post-acceptance fact that people who never thought women should be ski jumping (although apparently a common argument was that women would be at risk for having their uteri fall out… pah) would love to use. It also caught my eye though because of the generally higher incidence of torn ACLs that female athletes suffer.
Either way, I’m glad women are able to compete and I hope no one tears their ACL… except maybe the uteri fear mongerers.
What are Some Olympic Ski Jumping Stories?
I got nothing. I’m sitting in a hotel room in the French town of Arles just 50 feet from an ancient roman stadium and hopefully a couple hours from some steak frites. Plus the Olympics have already started. Turn your tv on and watch some!!
Thanks for reading,
Ezra