Gliding through the air, Sarah Hendrickson clears the equivalent distance of a New York City street block in less than four seconds, her reed-thin figure thrust unnaturally forward. Her nose appears to be almost even with her skis, which are splayed, like some kind of prehistoric bird, in a classic V shape.
“I’ve taken 10,000 jumps in my life, so I’m thinking about the technical aspects, not the ‘Wow! I’m flying!’ side of things,” the Olympic ski-jumping contender tells The Post, after a recent training leap in Park City, Utah.
Then she stops herself for a moment because, on reflection, there’s no getting away from the insanity of springing off a 300-foot slope at 65 miles per hour. “Yeah, I suppose it’s a bit of a crazy thing to do,” concedes the 19-year-old gold-medal favorite.
So crazy, in fact, that, until now, the fairer sex was excluded from Olympic ski-jumping for nearly a century. This will finally change in Sochi next week when Hendrickson and her two teammates, Lindsey Van, 29, and Jessica Jerome, 26, along with 27 other women from 11 countries, make history as the first female ski-jumpers to compete in the games.
Bizarrely, one of the main — and most enduring — arguments against women ski-jumping was the potential damage to a female’s reproductive system. Never mind that, last time we checked, the male merchandise is an exterior appendage, a biological truth that’s never deterred the legions of men who have ski-jumped in the modern games since 1924.
“My baby-making organs are on the inside,” Van told NBC last year. “Men have an organ on the outside. So if it’s not safe for me jumping down, and my uterus is going to fall out, what about the organ on the outside of the body?”
Feminist scholars have traced the ban on leaping lasses back to Victorian England. In his 1837 book “Exercise for Ladies,” self-appointed expert Donald Walker wrote that strenuous activity could “deform the lower part of the body.” Women, he said, should engage in “restrained and non-violent” exercise to protect their “peculiar function of multiplying the species.”
But Walker’s warnings didn’t stop Europeans, like the plucky Austrian “Floating Baroness” Paula Lamberg, from ski-jumping in skirts at the beginning of the 20th century. In the 1950s, some women even went so far as to disguise themselves as men to compete.
By the 1990s, the sport — and women’s athletics in general — had seen a major growth in popularity, but various committees continued to resist gender equality when it came to ski-jumping. They claimed that women’s spinal bones were liable to break, while insurance companies refused to cover specific injuries for female athletes.
As recently as 2005, Gian Franco Kasper, president of the Federation Internationale de Ski, spouted that a woman’s womb would burst upon landing, saying: “It’s like jumping down from, let’s say, about two meters on the ground about a thousand times a year, which seems not to be appropriate for ladies, from a medical point of view.”
Not surprisingly, given such comments, the FIS and the male-dominated International Olympic Committee have repeatedly been accused of sexism by campaigners for equality in sports.
Deedee Corradini, president of Women’s Ski Jumping USA, suggests the authorities held out for so long because the guys couldn’t face the humiliation of being “out-jumped” by the girls.
“The fact is that, the smaller and lighter you are, the further you fly,” says Corradini, a former mayor of Salt Lake City who spearheaded a legal fight that began in 2002 to get the IOC to let females take the leap. “Our best women can jump as far as the best men so, in some ways, that became threatening to the macho culture of ski-jumping.”
Victory finally came in April 2011, when the IOC announced that Sochi would host a women’s ski-jumping event. It was a big win, but it wasn’t a total victory. While the men will jump off the big K-120 hill (the K point is the average distance in meters from the take-off to the steepest point of the landing area, which the jumper aims to land in) in the games, their female counterparts will only be allowed to compete off the smaller, less challenging K-90 hill. Nevertheless, it’s a groundbreaking moment for Hendrickson and her fellow competitors that promises to be one of the games’ highlights.
“The TV coverage means the sport has access to every home in America . . . to have that mainstream appeal is huge,” says John Davies, managing editor of the ski and snowboarding magazine Powder. “The girls’ battle to be included is a great story, and watching them fly through the air more than 300 feet is wildly entertaining.”
NBC predicts major interest in the women’s event, which takes place on Feb. 11. The buzz has already been building, with two of the sponsors of the US ski-jumping team, Visa and Kellogg’s, releasing commercials portraying Hendrickson and her pals as trailblazing sisters of glory.
Hendrickson is enjoying the spotlight.
“The sport changed my life, so it’s awesome to be this veteran who can help spread the knowledge of female ski-jumping around the United States,” she says.
But the medal hopeful insists that she’s not feeling the pressure, despite only recently recovering from a devastating knee injury. Last August, she crash-landed after gliding a mind-boggling 485 feet (the equivalent of 1 ¹/₂ football fields) on a “too-perfect” training jump. Painful surgery and months of rehab followed.
“It’s just very exciting and a real honor to be part of the team,” says the athlete. “You definitely have to have guts when you first start out, but now it doesn’t even faze me.
“It’s considered an extreme sport, but, contrary to what people think, it’s really very safe.”
We’ll take her word for it. And cheer her on from the comfort of our couches.
Sarah Hendrickson
Age: 19
Hometown: Park City, Utah
Longest jump: 143 meters (469 feet)
The 5-foot-3 dynamo weighs just 96 pounds, and she keeps close tabs on her weight for optimum flying. “Luckily, I come from an athletic family,” Hendrickson tells The Post. “My natural body type is slender, but I eat healthily and put the right things in my body so I have enough energy.” After a brutal crash-landing in August 2013 that severely damaged her cruciate ligament, she endured a painful rehab involving a Japanese medical treatment in which tight tourniquets directed blood flow to her legs. “I’m just glad it [the surgery and rehab] is over,” says Hendrickson, whose Scandinavian boyfriend, Tom Hilde, 26, just missed out on making the Norwegian Olympic ski-jumping team this year.
Lindsey Van
Age: 29
Hometown: Park City, Utah
Longest jump: 171 meters (561 feet)
Not to be confused with Alpine skier and Tiger Woods’ current squeeze Lindsey Vonn (who is injured and out of the Olympics), Van wept outside a 2009 appeals court after Canadian judges rejected a case to force the International Olympic Committee to include women’s ski-jumping in the 2010 Vancouver Games, comparing it to the Taliban. Now, despite rupturing her spleen at 14 and breaking her back in six places in 2009, she is getting her chance to jump at an Olympics. “The closest thing I can relate it [ski-jumping] to would be putting your hand out of the car window at 60 miles per hour,” she recently told Rolling Stone magazine. “You can feel every little movement. Now magnify that to your whole body.”
Jessica Jerome
Age: 26
Hometown: Jacksonville, Fla.
Longest jump: 138 meters (453 feet)
A self-confessed “headcase” who says she finds the sport “absolutely addicting,” Jerome sued the IOC in 2010, demanding that she be allowed to compete in the men’s ski-jumping event. She lost that particular battle but helped win the war, and now she’s looking forward to focusing on the sport, not her gender. “When we were doing all that court stuff … all I wanted to do was train,” the economics major at Westminster College recently said. “I’m happy that we did that. But all I ever wanted to do was just be an athlete.”
Daniele Iraschko-Stolz
Age: 30
Hometown: Eisenerz, Austria
Longest jump: 200 meters (656 feet)
Known for dyeing her spiky blond hair neon colors and being an outspoken supporter of gay rights, Iraschko-Stolz was the first woman skier to clear the hallowed 200-meter jump mark, in 2003. “A good jump feels like freedom,” she has said. “It is indescribable when you jump far, and indescribably awful when you don’t.”
Sara Takanashi
Age: 17
Hometown: Kamikawa, Japan
Longest jump: 110.5 meters (363 feet)
This 4-foot-11 high school student is considered Hendrickson’s main adversary. Many are dubbing the inaugural women’s ski-jumping Olympic event “the Sarah of the West versus the Sara of the East show.” But Takanashi says: “Sarah is a sort of icon rather than a rival.”