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photo: Dan Campbell

Members of the U.S. Women’s Ski Jumping Team gathered last April for breakfast at a house on a quiet street in Park City, Utah. The home belonged to former Salt Lake City Mayor Deedee Corradini — a longtime advocate of the team and the sport — and over their bagels and coffee, they were waiting to hear if they would become Olympic athletes.

That morning, the International Olympic Committee would announce if women’s ski jumping would be an event at the next Olympic Winter Games, an opportunity ripped from their grasp at the Vancouver Games 15 months earlier after the athletes lost a hard-fought gender-discrimination court case. Although more than 20 countries had world-class teams competing internationally, ski jumping was the only Olympic sport in which women were not allowed to participate.

An IOC press conference from London blared over a speakerphone. The young women, stoic in the face of losses competitive and legal, stared at each other in shock when the announcement was made, then cheered and hugged all around. Their battle for IOC recognition — which sometimes felt more strenuous than their grueling, six-day-a-week training regimen — was finally over.

But another battle was just beginning.

“We have had to fight tooth and nail to get to where we are now,” says Lindsey Van, 27, who began jumping at age 7 in her home town of Park City, and was the first to win a World Championship in Women’s Ski Jumping after the International Ski Federation (FIS) opened to the sport in 2009. “The fight has been exhausting, so when the IOC finally said yes, all I felt was relief, as though I’d barely avoided a car crash. Everyone else was excited, but I just kind of sat there. OK, I thought, we can get on with it now.”

The long, emotional journey had intensified during the lawsuit against the Vancouver Organizing Committee, host of the 2010 Games. Enlisting 13 other top international women ski jumpers, Van and teammate Jessica Jerome, now 24, led the effort to take the committee to court in Canada as a way to force themselves into the Games. Though the judge agreed with the suit’s contention that the International Olympic Committee was discriminating against women, it noted that the Canadian court had no jurisdiction over IOC decisions.

“It took a lot of guts for those girls to sign the lawsuit,” Deedee Corradini, the president of WSJ-USA, told me in her Park City office. “They were scared to death. They could have been penalized, yet it had to be the athletes who filed the suit.” Getting the IOC to admit Women’s Ski Jumping into the Olympics, she added, was also the toughest feat she had ever accomplished, next to winning the Olympic Games for Salt Lake City when she was mayor from 1992 to 2000. “I got to know the IOC very well back then, and that helped in this fight. The IOC was embarrassed by the results of the lawsuit. I know it made a difference.”

Also of help was the FIS’s inclusion of Women’s Ski Jumping in the Nordic World Championships of 2009, which came with a public recommendation that the IOC include the discipline in the Vancouver Games. As the parent organization to ski sports globally, FIS not only runs the World Championships, but also the elite World Cup tour and the Continental Cup tour, which has offered international Women’s Ski Jumping competitions since 2004. For the first time this winter, the women are also jumping on the World Cup in 15 competitions with broad television exposure (at least in Europe).

The sun was bright, the aspen trees in full foliage on the summer morning I arrive at Park City’s Olympic Park, the ski-jumping site of the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympic Games and home to the U.S. team. The two jumps — a K90 and a K120 — soar above the steep landing hill covered in strips of green plastic that replicate the slick quality of hard snow. The team’s five athletes are warming up on the roller jump, a 25-foot slanted wood track that allows jumpers to practice the take-off, a jump’s most critical moment. One by one, they bend into an aerodynamic tuck on the small platform that rolls down the ramp. At the bottom, gauging their timing to the millisecond, each explodes upward and outward onto a cushioned mat.

“It’s all about muscle memory,” Jerome explains as I watch each jumper dial in her technique before heading to the hill. “That moment has to become automatic, so we do it over and over and over. You can’t think about it or you’ll mess up. Your body has to sense that exact moment, not your mind.”