In 1907, the women of Finland were granted the right to vote and run for office. A Finnish humor newspaper, called Fyren, published the above cartoon, using the female ski jumper as a symbol of women´s suffrage. The image of a ski jumper wearing a dress was not really an exaggeration.
At a ski jumping competition in Norway in 1862, Ingrid Olavsdottir Vestby was airborne for almost 20 feet, her skirts flying through the air. She landed way past the point where a male competitor had lost his balance.
Women´s ski jumping did not end with Vestby. In 1910, Austrian Paula Lamberg, the “Floating Baroness” set a world record in women’s ski jumping. Her country’s Illustrierte Zeitung magazine had this to say:
“Jumps of this length are very good, even for men. It is understandable that ski jumping is performed very rarely by women, and taking a close look, not really a recommendable sport. One prefers to see women with nicely mellifluous movements, which show elegance and grace, like in ice skating or lawn tennis…and it is not enjoyable or aesthetic to see how a representative of the fair sex falls when jumping from a hill, flips over and with mussed-up hair glides down towards the valley in a snow cloud.”
In the following decades, other feisty female ski jumpers embraced the sport, but the International Olympic Committee refused to allow them to compete in the Olympic games. They claimed that the sport was too small, with too few female competitors. The real reason, however, had to do with misconceptions about the things ski jumping could do to a woman´s girly parts.
In a 2005 interview featured on National Public Radio, Gian Franco Kasper, president of the International Ski Federation, had this to say:
“Don’t forget, it’s like jumping down from, let’s say, about two meters on the ground about a thousand times a year, which seems not to be appropriate for ladies from a medical point of view.”
It´s been a long, hard struggle, but in 2014, female ski jumpers will be allowed to compete in the Winter Olympics at Sochi. It´s about time!