Too Fit to Fly: How Female Nordic Ski Jumping Challenges the IOC's Approach to Gender Equality

Introduction As of the 2010 Olympic Winter Games, Nordic ski jumping and the related discipline of Nordic combined remain the only disciplines at the Winter Games without women's events. (1) While the International Olympic Committee (IOC) chose not to include women ski jumpers in the Vancouver Olympic Winter Games, IOC President Jacques Rogge's recent comments and the IOC's decision to include women's ski jumping in the 2012 Winter Youth Olympic Games indicate that the IOC will likely include women's ski jumpers in future Winter Olympics. (2) If this possibility becomes a reality, clearly the IOC will be taking a positive step towards undoing gender biases that have long hindered female athletes. Yet given the nature of ski jumping, including a women's ski jumping event also raises a number of questions about the IOC's gender policies that currently the IOC remains unprepared to answer. (3) If the IOC fails to adequately address these gender issues, it risks further gender discrimination that will unjustifiably limit not just who can compete in Olympic sport but how they compete. With the IOC's substantial role in guiding sport's policies, if this discrimination remains unchecked at the international level, such discriminations may continue throughout the lower ranks of sport. This will result in a disastrously self-perpetuating cycle where legitimate athletes find themselves discouraged from participation and with few opportunities for competing at levels. Indeed, the IOC needs to reconsider its approach to gender and gendered competition in sport in order to promote the best possible competition and avoid unfounded biases that result in discriminatory policies. To justify this claim, I raise three challenges that including women ski jumpers poses to the IOC's approach towards gender in sport. First, I will provide evidence showing that unfounded gender bias within the International Ski Federation (FIS) has historically stymied the growth of women's ski jumping. This evidence provides reason to question the IOC's policy for including women's events. Second, I put forward the idea that ski jumping opens the possibility for women to outperform men. Given this possibility, one may ask whether the IOC ought to begin gender testing men to ensure that no women compete in the men's events. Such questions, I argue, indicate potential flaws in the IOC's gender verification policy. Last, I argue that ski jumping raises larger philosophical questions about gendered sporting events where biological differences play insignificant roles in sporting performance. This questions the IOC's policy of mandatory gender parity rather than gender-neutral competition. Taken together, these three challenges indicate that the IOC's policies remain unprepared to fully address the issues of gender in sport. Idraet, Idraetsmen, and Gender Bias in Sporting Organizations Today, the IOC points to the underdeveloped nature of women's ski jumping-euphemistically referred to as the sport's lack of technical merit-for grounds not to include the events in the Olympic program. (4) To be sure, such an argument rings hollow since the IOC introduced other women's sports with far less technical merit than women's ski jumping. (5) For the purposes of this paper, however, I take the IOC's position at face value. Granting that the IOC believed women's ski jumping still lacked the requisite technical merit for inclusion in the Olympic program, I still conclude that its decision indicates a fundamental flaw in its policy towards gender in sport. The IOC's argument that women's ski jumping lacked the requisite technical merit essentially holds that too few women jumpers exist in the world and that the sport has not reached an elite enough level for it to merit inclusion in the Olympic Games. Had more women jumpers existed, or had FIS held more world championships or established an international circuit earlier, then likely the IOC would have included the event in the 2010 Games. …

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