Lake Placid hosting 1st women’s World Cup ski jumping event in US, possibly Olympic sliding events
United States’ Annika Belshaw competes at the Women’s Normal Hill Individual Ski Jumping World Cup event in Villach, Austria, Jan. 3, 2024. (AP Photo/Darko Bandic, File)
The first women’s World Cup ski jumping event in the United States is this weekend in Lake Placid, New York.
Women, thanks to fundraising efforts, are expected to make as much money as male counterparts.
Former U.S. national team members Nina Lussi, Lindsey Van, Jessica Jerome and Tara Geraghty-Moats started a GoFundMe campaign to address the disparity and raised nearly $9,000 by Thursday afternoon. U.S. Ski and Snowboard and USA Ski Jumping also contributed funds, and a portion of ticket sales Friday, Saturday and Sunday will also go toward increasing the women’s purse that is about one-third of the total men are awarded.
“I’m confident when competition begins, the prize awards for men and women will be equal,” Lake Placid-based Olympic Regional Development Authority spokeswoman Darcy Norfolk said in a telephone interview Thursday.
The International Ski Federation (FIS) will give 13,000 Swiss francs, roughly $14,000, to the men’s winner and 4,300 Swiss francs, or about $4,800, to the women’s winner.
“I will be the women’s race director starting next season, and this will be one of the priorities to improve the situation as fast as possible,” Sandro Pertile, the men’s ski jumping race director for the governing body, said in a telephone interview. “This will not change overnight, but we for sure want to increase visibility and attention for the women.
“The difference is, women’s ski jumping is a much younger sport. Men have the tradition of more than 100 years. For women, it has been 20 or 25 years.”
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Women have been playing catch up in the sport for more than a century.
Olympic ski jumping included only men from the first Winter Games in 1924 in France through the 2010 Vancouver Games. Finally, women in the sport made their Olympic debut in 2014.
Twelve years after women ski jumpers competed at the World Cup level for the first time and two years after the men returned to Lake Placid, they’re jumping in the U.S. on a far-flung circuit that has stops in Europe and Asia.
“Competing in a World Cup event here in Lake Placid is such a meaningful experience,” American jumper Annika Belshaw said Thursday when the women had training and qualification rounds.
Lake Placid, home of the 1980 and 1932 Winter Olympics, is also Plan B for sliding events during next year’s Milan-Cortina Games.
A century-old sliding center in Italy is being completely rebuilt for the 2026 Olympics. The International Olympic Committee was concerned enough about the construction timeline that cities around the world submitted bids to provide backup venues for bobsled, luge and skeleton events.
There’s a March deadline for pre-certification of the Cortina track, when Lake Placid may be on the clock to be on the world’s stage again.
The IOC would have preferred to use an active track in nearby Austria or Switzerland instead of rebuilding the Cortina venue, which had been closed since 2008, but chose Lake Placid because it didn’t require any infrastructure investments.
“Most places get seven years for prepare to host the Olympics and we might have 10 months,” Norfolk said. “We’re hosting world championships next month so we’re more than hosting an event of this scale.”
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