Who says inequality in sport doesn’t exist? Not seven-time world champion Katharina Schmid and two-time Winter Olympic silver medalist and the only ski jumper, male or female to win four or more medals in a single world championships (2023 Planica).
Schmid received the ultimate insult at a ski jumping qualifying event at the Two Nights Tour at Garmisch-Partenkirchen in Germany to kick off 2025.
While the male winner of the qualifying event competed in front of a crowd of 10,000 and won 3000 Swiss Francs (over AUD$5000), Schmid went on an hour later to win the women’s qualifying event in front of a reduced crowd of 3000 and took home a hygiene pack for her trouble (dubbed Shampoogate).
The shower cream, shampoo and four towels prize pack is reminiscent of your grandma’s Christmas gift or rather the coffee set given to the German Women’s Soccer team when they won the 1989 European Championship.
Are we surprised, though? The sport of ski jumping has been in the Olympics since 1924, if you’re a man. If you’re a female ski jumper you had to wait 90 years until the Sochi Olympics in 2014. Why? All the excuses from “it’s too dangerous for women” (bless) to not enough female ski jumpers. The latter irony being why would you want to be a ski jumper if only the men had an Olympic pathway.
The IOC’s ruling, noted a Vancouver Sun editorial in 2008, was particularly galling given that it was the very organization that wel-comed to competition Eddie (The Eagle) Edwards, the “affable short sighted overweight plasterer from Cheltenham who earned a last place finish for Great Britain at the 1988 Calgary Olympic Games in the men’s ski jumping competi-tion. ”
Yet back in 2010 American female ski jumper Lindsey Van took the overall record at the Vancouver Olympics site for the longest jump of 105.5m. Admittedly the men had yet to jump it, but the current record is now only three metres more, 108.0 metres by four time Olympic gold medalist Simon Amman.
Van went on to file suit against the 2010 Winter Olympics organisers for violating the female ski jumpers rights by allowing only male ski jumpers to compete.
It doesn’t help that in 2014 when the sport was finally “allowed” for females at an Olympic Level, the Russian ski jumping coach, Alexander Arefyev, went on the record in the media advocating for women to stay home and make babies.
In an interview with Izvestia (pro Kremlin newspaper) he was quoted as saying:
“I admit, I’m not a fan of women’s ski jumping. It’s a pretty difficult sport with a high risk of injury. If a man gets a serious injury, it’s still not fatal, but for women it could end much more seriously.
The two are not mutually exclusive. Nine mothers won eight medals for Team GB in the Paris Olympics; just six months after giving birth USA athlete Femora Ayanbeku won gold in the 100m sprint in the Paris Paralympics and our own Lydia Lassila (Winter Olympic gold and bronze aerial skiing medalist) won bronze in the 2014 Sochi Olympics as a mother of one at the time.
While FIS prize money in AUDI FIS World Cup ski racing is equal for both the male and female events, the sport of ski jumping not so much.
Just saying…
*feature image credit, FIS/NordicFocus of Katharina Schmid
