Women will not compete in ski jumping at the 2010 Games. Photo Credit: Media Canada

On December 22nd, the Supreme Court of Canada refused to hear the appeal of the female ski jumpers who wished to compete for the first time at the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Winter Games, ending the women’s court battle. The SCC gave no reason for its decision.

The unfortunate legacy of exclusion of women’s ski jumping from the Winter Olympics will hereby continue in Vancouver.

Upon hearing this news, my first inclination was to accept the IOC’s rationale: that women’s ski jumping lacked sufficient participation to be included in the Olympics, on a national and an individual level. Not enough gals, not enough countries, and a simple equation.

After all, this is Canada’s Olympics; our Olympics. Surely a country that prides itself on tolerance, multiculturalism and gender equity would not idly allow gender discrimination to prevail in Vancouver, the most populous city ever to host the Winter Games.

Sadly, my assumptions proved incorrect.

According to a BC judge, the IOC is indeed guilty of discrimination against the female ski jumpers. The IOC’s position is that women’s ski jumping has been excluded from the 2010 games not on account of “discrimination,” but rather for “technical reasons,” presumably on the grounds that the now-defunct Rule 47 of the IOC charter prohibits the inclusion of sports with too few participants. However, the IOC continues to defend the legitimacy of men’s ski jumping as a traditional Olympic event, even though men’s ski jumping also lacks the requisite number of national participants. This attitude, referred to in the BC Supreme Court case as the “grandfathering” of men’s ski jumping, dates back to the early days of the Winter Games, from 1920 to 1949, when women were arbitrarily declared to be inapt for Olympic ski jumping.

Rather than hold the defendant in the BC Supreme Court case, VANOC, responsible for an obvious faux pas, Madame Justice Fenlon ruled that the staging of events is beyond the scope of the Organizing Committee. In fact, Madame Justice Fenlon’s decision appears to acknowledge that the IOC is the sole determinant of which events to allow and which to prohibit, and is not subject to Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The court’s hands were tied on this one; the lack of a women’s ski jumping event is not VANOC’s fault, and the real culprit has gotten off scot free.

The question is, are we Canadians willing to accept a discriminatory policy, in conflict with our Charter, as part of our own national showcase? Whatever happened to Canadian clout?

Certainly, our leadership has not been averse to making political statements around past Olympics. Most recently, Stephen Harper declined an invitation to the opening ceremonies in Beijing out of concern for China’s human rights shortfalls. But our Prime Minister can hardly be expected to boycott an opening ceremony in his own country to protest a breach of the Canadian charter on the part of the IOC. And how far-reaching must an issue be before it warrants that type of action on the part of a politician? The ramifications are simply mind-bending.

It seems that the best the female ski jumpers can hope for is that by the time the Olympic Torch makes its way to Russia in 2014, the IOC will have chosen to create an event for them. And if the IOC does, fair or unfair, it will appear to the world that the Russians have managed to solve a problem we could not.

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Tags: ioc, supreme court of canada, vancouver 2010 winter olympics, vanoc, women's ski jumping

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 2nd, 2010 at 3:10 pm and is filed under Olympics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.