Simon Ammann of Switzerland won the first gold medal of the 2010 Vancouver Games, breaking the Whistler, B.C. course record that had previously been held by a woman. Although Ammann only beat twenty-five year old Lindsay Van’s score by 2.5 meters, Van herself will not be competing in these Olympics. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has made ski jumping the only event in the winter Olympics that women cannot partake in. Van, a leader in women’s ski jumping, won gold at the 2009 Nordic World Ski Championship and wants the opportunity to compete in the Olympics. Van trains eleven months out of the year and has found herself unable to accept her sports absence, referring to the IOC as, “the Taliban of Olympics,” in an article by Canada’s CBC News.
Yet Van is not the first one to cause a stir. Female athletes have been protesting at these events since 1998 when the Olympics were in Nagano, Japan. In 1991 the IOC said that any future Olympic sports had to be open to both men and women, yet ski jumping has been around since the winter Olympics began, therefore omitting it from the ruling. Before the 2010 games Van and fourteen other female ski jumpers from multiple countries took up a lawsuit with the British Columbia Court of Appeals. The skiers tried to sue the Vancouver Organizing Committee for discrimination and the court agreed. Yet the court felt that they could not tell IOC what to do because it is an international organization, not Canadian. Brokenhearted Van was found full of tears after the news hit and is currently wondering whether she should finish her undergraduate degree or continue skiing without an Olympic dream.
Mount Holyoke Athletic Director Laurie Priest commented on this issue: “The International Olympic Committee has discriminated against female athletes since the start of the modern Olympics in the late 1800′s. Women are still significantly underrepresented in both the summer and winter Olympics.”
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