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...below a world championship - for only two years. The sport didn't have very many high-profile, FIS-sanctioned competitions, but that too may have owed to gender bias. In 2005, Gian Franco Kasper, FIS president and a member of the IOC, said he didn't think women should ski jump because the sport "seems not to be appropriate for ladies from a medical point of view." By the time women's ski jumping was included at a world-championship-level event in 2009, it was too late; Vancouver's Olympic event schedule was already established...
Lindsey Van holds the record - among both men and women - for the longest jump off Whistler, British Columbia's normal ski jump, built for the 2010 Vancouver Olympics. The 25-year-old skier trains six days a week, 11 months a year, and has been jumping for the past 19 years. But when the Games kick off on Feb. 12, the 2009 women's ski-jumping world champion will be nowhere in sight. That's because women aren't allowed to ski jump in the Olympics. (See TIME's 25 Winter Olympic athletes to watch...
...lack of trying. Female ski jumpers have petitioned to join every Winter Olympics since Nagano in 1998, and each time they have been denied by the International Olympics Committee (IOC). In fact, ski jumping is the only Olympic discipline to remain men-only. (Technically, Nordic combined is also limited to males, but that's because it includes ski jumping.) In 1991 the IOC announced that all future Olympic sports must be open to both genders, but the rule didn't apply to sports that already existed - and as one of the 16 original events in the inaugural Winter Games...
...think there's any discrimination going on," says Joe Lamb, the U.S. ski-team representative for the International Ski Federation's (FIS) ski-jumping committee. "It may seem like that, but there are hundreds of other issues at play." Vancouver can accommodate only so many athletes, says Lamb, and whenever a new event is introduced, it limits the number of people able to participate in others. That, coupled with the IOC's list of criteria that a sport must meet before it is accepted - a history of world championships and a sizable number of athletes participating worldwide - made the women...
...declined interview requests for this article, but a spokesperson provided a written statement saying, "Women's Ski Jumping does not reach the necessary technical criteria and as such does not yet warrant a place alongside other Olympic events." Van isn't sure what that means. "I would love to know what the technical merits are," she says. "We have international competitions and our own championships. We meet all the technical requirements...