The Olympics Should Include Women's Ski Jumping--But Not By Court Order

When the Winter Olympics begin in mid-February, they will do so without women ski jumpers, making ski jumping the only sport in the Winter Games which is male-only.  This was not through lack of trying on the part of a dedicated group of elite jumpers, who have fought the IOC policy all the way to the Canadian Supreme Court, which refused to hear the case.  The athletes argued that the policy violated Canadian human rights law, and enough judges agreed with them to keep the case going for months.  Indeed, all the judges agreed with them, in principle.

There is little that is defensible about the policy itself.  The ostensible IOC reasoning is that there are not enough jumpers at the highest level to keep the event competitive. This same argument was recently used to remove softball from the Games for its lack of depth and international presence.  But pundits whisper none too softly that softball has been a victim of the IOC's politically-motivated campaign to strip baseball of its Olympic status.  Many events, like women's basketball, remain despite being dominated by one or two countries.   This is particularly true in the Winter Games, where events are skewed toward cold-weather European countries.  The ski jumping policy looks even more silly in light of this piece in the Christian Science Monitor, which claims that a sport with far fewer top competitors was admitted at the same 2006 meeting which barred jumping, and, damningly, that good old-fashioned sexism about women's abilities and patronizing rhetoric about their safety were the real impeti behind the ban. 

However, in the final analysis the question was not whether the ruling was foolish.  The question was whether it could fall under the jurisdiction of a host nation.  The Canadians decided that the IOC is its own legal entity vis-à-vis the Games.  This is a knotty issue.  The IOC is, of course, far from perfect. It elects its own members and with billions of dollars at sake has to contend with constant problems of accountability and corruption.  This makes it more difficult for a group with minimal lobbying power to convince it to change its policies.  Lobbying power tends to be defined, unsurprisingly, in economic terms.  Most political action by the IOC has been taken under threat of boycott, which puts tremendous pressure on the host city, which has gone into massive debt.  Legal challenges may seem preferable. But if we allow national law, however noble, to override the IOC's decisions about the Olympics, we open the door for all national law to do so.

Before condemning the IOC's ability to uphold prejudicial or antiquated rules in the face of more progressive national statutes, remember that the Olympics aren't always held in nations like Canada.  In 1936, both the Winter and Summer Games were held in Nazi Germany.  Even though many IOC members at the time had fascist sympathies, the IOC did not permit German national law to dictate who was able to compete.  The Nazis barred so-called non-Aryans from competing for Germany, and looked particularly foolish when their racial superiority doctrine faced the reality of competitors like Jesse Owens.  If the example is too extreme, consider instead Soviet Moscow, Beijing, or even the United States to its detractors.  The IOC is not required to sign onto any doctrines or policies of the host country, be they overly oppressive or, to opposing factions, overly permissive. The Games are supposed to carve out their own semi-autonomous niche in order for nations to meet on an equal footing, both athletic and ideological.

Thus we have a deeply imperfect reality and a deeply imperfect alternative.  It seems to me better to try and convince the IOC that it is wrong about women and ski jumping than to open the floodgates to legal challenge.  The IOC has already permitted women's boxing, and being definitively pummeled by a person up close seems just as, or perhaps more, dangerous and confounding of gender norms than jumping off a mountain. It is unjust that the current set of athletes will miss the opportunity this time around.  But there remains hope that justice will prevail in 2014.   

by Fat Louie - the pseudonymous author of the womens sports blog.