The comfortable delights of ski jumping
Last Updated: Tuesday, February 23, 2010 | 10:33 AM ET
The New York Times for CBC Sports
Once the extreme athletes of the Winter Olympics, ski jumpers now seem quaint. (Matthias Schrader/Associated Press) WHISTLER, B.C. — Ski jumping could use more cowbell. But that might wake the children.
As the Winter Olympics get bigger, faster, higher and slipperier, the original danger sport of ski jumping feels quaint and old-fashioned.
There were no surprises at the team competition on Monday. Austria won, just as everyone suspected. No one fell, except on the slick ice in the crowd. There were certainly no “agony of defeat” moments of someone cart-wheeling off the ramp.
Most jumpers (really, they might be called fallers, because they mostly drop over the edge of a steep landing hill) landed within a few metres of one another. Any jump beyond the line marking 125 metres was greeted by cheers and cowbells. Hit 140 — more cheers. More cowbell.
The metronomic consistency of the jumpers made it easy to forget just how fast (up to about 95 kilometres per hour) and far (nearly one-and-a-half times the length of a football or soccer field) they actually go.
There were grandstands, but most fans stood at the bottom, bunched by rooting interest — the Austrians here, the Poles there, the Japanese in between. Others without nationalistic props spread a blanket on the snow. They ate, drank and watched their children nap in the sun. It felt like a concert in the park.
“Hey, folks, this isn’t a golf tournament,” a voice on the public-address system said during one lull.
So this is what extreme sports at the Winter Olympics used to look like, before snowboarding and ski cross and skeleton and short-track speedskating overwhelmed the Games with their own kinds of excitement and novelty. You know you are not reaching a broad audience when people say that the nearby cross-country races are more exciting.
Still, in some ways, ski jumping is comfortably delightful. People jump. Fans cheer. There are lots of flags. Many do not quite understand the style portion of the scoring system. Some things never change.
Ski jumping has been on the docket since the first Winter Olympics in 1924. Not long ago, the jumpers were considered the crazy ones. Now the sport feels stuck in time, and not just because they do not let women compete.
Music served as a backdrop on Monday. At one point, the Bryan Adams song "Summer of '69" came on, even though it felt more like the winter of '68. A man roving the crowd with a microphone implored people to sing.
“Because guess what?” he said as the giant video board showed him. “Bryan Adams’s mom is right here!”
The camera panned behind him to a woman in a chair. Fans looked around asking each other: Was that really Bryan Adams’s mom? Then they turned back toward the mountain. People seemed more interested in taking photographs of one another at the event than the event itself.
A beefy Pole named Czeslaw Matyga, who now lives in Vancouver and works as a carpenter, held a big flag and wore the traditional dress of the highland region of southern Poland, in the Tatra mountains, near the winter-sports capital of Zakopane.
He had a white wool coat over a black, fuzzy wool jacket, over a white linen shirt. There was a lot of embroidery. He wore leather shoes, long socks, a black hat brimmed with feathers and a hearty moustache. The costume (not including the moustache) cost $7,000 US, he said, and he has had one made for all five of his children and five grandchildren. “It’s tradition,” he said.
(Matyga also wore a large gold ring that read “Sturgis.” He rides a Harley Davidson. But he wears a different costume for that.)
People constantly approached, and he gladly posed for pictures. He probably had more pictures taken of him than Adam Malysz, the famed Polish jumper.
The pace of the competition slowed near the end because breezes, barely discernible at the bottom of the hill, were deemed too unsafe or unfair for competition. Then Norway’s Anders Jacobsen came down and jumped/dropped 140.5 metres. There was much cheering and clanging from the Norwegians.
Then Germany’s Michael Uhrmann jumped/dropped 140 metres, and that was enough to nudge Norway out of the silver medal. There was more cheering and clanging from the Germans.
Finally, Austria’s Gregor Schlierenzauer, who had already won two bronze medals in the individual events, soared 146.5 metres, the longest jump of the Olympics. He landed to a roar, fell back on his skis and popped back up. People wondered what the judges would do. People wondered what the judges do in general.
It was more than enough for Austria. Austrians waved flags and sang “Immer Wieder Osterreich,” or Austria forever. People gathered to take pictures of the fans more than the athletes.
Then most headed toward the exits, intoxicated by the impossibly blue sky, the surrounding white-capped mountains and the pleasant vibe not usually found on a Monday morning. They gathered their blankets and their belongings and roused their children.
Maybe team ski jumping should consider having each four-man team jump at once. That would keep the kids awake.
