Freedom to fly fuels women on Olympic stage

Canadian athletes enjoying gains in long battle for level playing field

PYEONGCHANG, SOUTH KOREA— When Alex Gough raced down the track here to win Canada’s first Olympic luge medal, her runs were142 metres shorter than the men’s because, in luge, women are required to start from a lower point on the track.

Kaillie Humphries and Phylicia George won a bronze medal in women’s bobsled, but unlike their male teammates who won gold in the twoman event they won’t get another chance at a medal in the faster fourman event. That simply doesn’t exist for women.

It’s a similar problem on the ski hill, where Canada’s Mackenzie BoydClowes competed on the normal and large hill but, as a woman, Taylor Henrich was limited to just one competition on the smaller jump. In alpine skiing, cross-country, biathlon and speed skating women race shorter distances than men here.

When it comes to gender inequality in sports the list goes on and on, from the development level right up to the pinnacle of winter sport at these Olympic Games. There are plenty of reasons why: from gender stereotypes and athletic traditions to sports funding and athlete quotas; and plenty of women fighting for change.

But the battle for an equal field of play is one that athletes such as Cassie Sharpe, Spencer O’Brien, Laurie Blouin and Kelsey Serwa know little about.

As freestyle skiers and snowboarders they use the same halfpipe, big air jump, and slopestyle and ski-cross courses as the men do.

That hasn’t been without some controversy, when the courses are made with the men’s field in mind and prove to be a struggle for the smaller, lighter women — especially in poor weather conditions — but having the same field of play is something they’re fiercely proud of.

“It’s this new breed of sport that doesn’t have a ladies team. We don’t have to ride a different halfpipe or smaller jumps just because we’re women. We’re viewed pretty equal in that sense,” said O’Brien, the twotime Olympic slopestyle snowboarder. “In so many traditional sports, girls can’t hit from the same tee as men or they have to play shorter matches. It’s always been this (idea that) girls are weaker and they need something easier.”

At the Olympic debut of big air on Thursday, the women launched themselves down a ramp with a 49metre (160-foot) drop, the very same one that the men will use for their event on Saturday.

And when Austria’s Anna Gasser nailed a cab double cork1080 — that’s flipping twice while spinning three times — to win the first Olympic gold in the event, the entire field she’d just beaten was there to congratulate her. O’Brien, who finished ninth, was the first to pick her up in a giant bear hug.

That’s because Gasser didn’t just win for herself but for all of women’s snowboarding, by demonstrating the level of tricks they can do when given a fair chance. For two years Gasser has been on the leading edge, pushing women’s sport into doubles, and that’s what made American Jamie Anderson, who won gold in slopestyle and silver in big air, start to think she could do more too.

“A couple years ago I really didn’t think I ever wanted to do doubles, and once Anna (Gasser) and Hailey (Langland) and some of those riders started doing it I thought: all right, maybe it’s not that bad.” Anderson said before the Olympics. “It’s been really cool to see the girls charging, getting out of their comfort zone and tapping into that power.”

But that might not have happened if the sport had gone to smaller slopestyle courses for women, as there was some pressure to do around the last Olympics when the jump size was skyrocketing to accommodate triples in the men’s field. And the speed of progression certainly wouldn’t have happened if the Olympics hadn’t included big air in these Games for men and women.

“I remember saying five years ago: women need big air . . . And the (X Games) event co-ordinator didn’t want it because they didn’t think we had big enough tricks. But it all has to start somewhere, and in the last two years of women competing in big air (at X Games), we’re now seeing tricks that guys were doing just a few years ago,” she said.

On top of the invite-only pro events, there’s a growing World Cup circuit providing a large international field of women with far more opportunities to develop harder tricks in big air and then bring them over to slopestyle, pushing both events forward.

That’s a far different world than what Henrich experiences in the more traditional sport of ski jumping. She wants to fly, which is how she describes jumping off the big hill. That’s something the men do at most World Cups, but women are only allowed to do twice a year.

“Having only two is kind of frustrating because I like to fly and I want to show that I can fly,” Henrich said in an interview before the Games.

But for them, it’s a catch-22. Because it’s such a small part of their competitive season, the women don’t practise it much, which means they don’t necessarily excel when they get the chance, and the international sport federation uses that as evidence that they’re not ready.

There was no doubt Sharpe, who won Olympic gold in halfpipe skiing, was ready. She made flying above the 22-foot-high walls of the pipe look as effortless as the top men did a few days later. “Girls and guys are differently built no matter how you look at it . . . and for us to be out here pushing it, and most of us going as big as they do a lot of the time, it makes me really proud to be a part of it.”