Sports / Sochi 2014 / Skiing

Gay ski jumper tops declaration with silver medal

That small declaration, in black of white, of who Daniela Iraschko-Stoltz is, what she is, may have been the bravest act of all.

Canada's Atsuko Tanaka finished 12th in the women's ski jump in Sochi on Tuesday.



KRASNAYA POLYANA, RUSSIA—In the biographical package that all athletes fill out for the Sochi 2014 Olympics, the official background sketch that contains competitive history and bits of personal colour — nicknames, hobbies, why I took up this sport — Daniela Iraschko-Stoltz included one most significant detail.

Under Family, she states: Wife, Isabel Stoltz.

Against the backdrop of anti-gay legislation that Russia passed last year, regressive laws which fly in the face of Olympic charter statutes that purportedly guard against any form of discrimination, this was a bold and defiant gesture.


Iraschko-Stoltz captured silver Tuesday in the inaugural women’s ski jump event. Women in this particular sport are doubtlessly courageous, to fling themselves off a mountain and soar through the air for upwards of a hundred metres. Clearly the 30-year-old Austrian is a gutsy dame and good at what she does because she finished on the podium.

But that small declaration, in black of white, of who she is, what she is, may have been the bravest act of all.

There are obviously gay athletes at these Games, though few have stepped up to say so, or otherwise challenge a Russian law that tacitly pushes them back in the closet. Homosexuality is legal in Russia but preferably on the QT and certainly stigmatizing. Olympics organizers have stated throughout that gays were welcome at the Games as long as they, you know, didn’t overtly provoke Russian sensibilities and try to corrupt the morals of young people by promoting a homosexual lifestyle.

But here was a lesbian athlete, elite in her skill, who subtly told Russia to stuff it.

That is far more impressive, at least to me, than the quasi-feminism seized upon as political justification for the inclusion of women’s ski jumping on the Olympic menu. The battle had particular traction in Canada, where a group of females fought for the right to participate in the Vancouver Games via lawsuit, claiming exclusion was a direct violation of Section 15 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

A B.C. Supreme Court judge agreed with them but said there wasn’t anything she could do about it; the issue as an International Olympic Committee responsibility not governed by the Charter. An appeal was denied.

So women didn’t fly in Vancouver.

The IOC ultimately reversed itself and, in April of 2011, formally accepted women’s ski jumping.

Much as I would like to blame the IOC and the International Ski Federation (FIS) for laggardness on this matter, it’s not that simple. Blatant sexism assuredly existed among the tall wrinkled foreheads at FIS. Its president, Gian-Franco Kasper, famously uttered one of the all-time stupid comments fretted about lady parts during a radio interview back in 2005: “Don’t forget. It’s jumping down from, let’s say, about two metres on the ground about 1,000 times a year, which seems not to be appropriate from a medical point of view.”

Not appropriate, he obviously meant, for uteruses, which he apparently believed might drop out of their hiding places when women hit the landing.

No uteri were strewn about the outrun last night.

But former IOC president Jacques Rogge was not entirely talking through his hat when he explained that objection to women’s ski jumping had to do with the small numbers of countries which would be competitive in a sport that only organized its first world championship a couple of years ago.

Rogge did not want to see the “diluting” of Olympic medals. The IOC was already stuck with women’s hockey, which is essentially a sport contested by two knock-down-drag-out opponents, Canada and the U.S. (Though dilution aversion does seem an odd concept when the Games have opened up to a deluge of “hip” extreme sports that are arguably not sports — not in the classic Olympic sense — at all.

Further, while Kasper was preoccupied with genitalia, he should have looked further down. Within 12 months of the IOC accepting women’s ski jumping, eight top-flight females had suffered serious injuries requiring long recovery.

The reasons for this are still being explored. But one theory suggests that, because women are smaller and weigh less than men — they needed a longer approach to make up for their lightness of being — the hard landings are proportionately more taxing physiologically on over-burdened knees.

This is a matter that should have been more extensively researched before the IOC opened up the sport to females.

In any event, the sport was warmly received here last night, with 30 females from a dozen countries showing their stuff on the “normal” hill because they’re still not permitted to join the boys on the “big hill,” not at the Olympics. Fourteen of them were teenagers, indicating this sport’s rapid rise in popularity with a new generation of jumpers. Many who fought the good fight to get females into the Games have since retired.

First female ski jumping gold was stunningly claimed by Carina Vogt, a 22-year-old cop from Germany who’d never before won a single world cup event. Vogt led after her first round jump of 103 metres and held on for the victory. Iraschko-Stoltz moved up from fifth after the first round for the silver and France’s Coline Mattel took bronze.

“I’m speechless,” gasped Vogt, after flailing around joyously on the out-run. “I’ve not won a world cup till now. It’s unbelievable. It wouldn’t have imagined that one day before.”

Iraschko-Stoltz: “I was a little bit shocked because I jumped so far and my landing was not very good. But I think I lost the gold in my first jump and now I have silver.”

Japan’s Sara Takanashi, who’d been favoured to take gold — she hadn’t missed the podium in her last 10 world cup events — dropped from third after the first round and finished fourth. “I became uptight and I just wasn’t as sharp as I usually am.”

Canada had two jumpers in the fray. Atsuko Tanaka, 22, wound up 12th, just ahead of Taylor Henrich, 18. Both hail from Calgary, where athletes have a ski-jump facility right in their backyard, a legacy of the ‘88 Games.

“That was awesome,” enthused Tanaka, who’d been a forerunner — testing the track — in Vancouver. “It would have been cool if I got to have a medal around my neck but it didn’t happen that way. I gave it everything I had, so I’m just happy with everything that happened today.

“It was weird. I didn’t feel as nervous as a World Cup. I was just really having fun up there with all the girls. We were high fiving each other and wishing each other good luck.”

She had been a part of history in the making and understood what that meant.

Tanaka anticipates the day — and surely it won’t be long in coming — when women are allowed to jump from the big hill too.

“I definitely think we could get a mixed team event and, with the four years, if we start getting more and more large-hill competitions, it will get added as well. Doing just one event and then leaving isn’t very fun. We’d like to have more events but it’s all up to the IOC. We’d definitely fight for it, I think, as we fought for this spot.”

Said Iraschko-Stoltz: “Today we celebrate.”

And she’ll be doing so with her wife. Got that?

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