Olympic proportions

As a kid I used to watch ABC’s “Wide World of Sports” on winter Saturday afternoons. This was the era when stores were open long hours, the day of the week when farmers and their families came to town to shop and socialize.

My parents often put in twelve-hour workdays on Saturdays, so for me, a latchkey kid, winter Saturday afternoons were dead boring. I’d already been to Zwagerman Hardware for a few hours and futzed around in the toy aisle. I leafed through the Reader’s Digest and McCall’s that my mom kept under the office counter. I was getting too old to hang out at grandma’s.

So, I headed home and turned on the TV and became friends with Jim McKay and the triumphant theme music as they spanned the globe looking for the “thrill of victory and the agony of defeat!” Every week, viewers watched some poor athlete wipe out on a ski jump descent and careen off the platform.

That ski jumping, though. As much as I loved ice skating, ski jumping seemed like the most terrifying, yet thrilling, dare-devil sport a person could do. Hang gliding hadn’t become popular yet, so watching a human zoom down a slope and take wing was the closest thing to human flight without a motor. Up, up, and away, and no beautiful balloon.

Today, ski jumping looks nothing like it did in my childhood. Back then, it was an open slope, which, if you fell, you became immortal, remembered for a spectacular wipeout that would replay forever. (See above.) Now, the run is bounded by steps and the athlete’s skis fit into tightly proscribed tracks. It seems so calculated, so sealed off from the wild danger of it all.

I remember when ski jumpers figured out that widening their skis tips into a V-shape would enhance aerodynamics. That was a big innovation, delivering up to 30% more lift. Seems like they should have figured that out sooner than the late 1980s. It’s physics, yo.

More recent “developments” are shrouded in controversy. This year some ski jumpers are participating in a weird sort of doping. Some reports say that male athletes are enhancing their nether regions with injections. Other reports debunk this. You decide, but male athletes have been known to “pack” the crotches of their suits for performance enhancement.

Apparently, a greater surface area in that region helps the aerodynamics. Huh.

What I’m more focused on is the fact that in all those years of watching ski jumping I never once — not once — asked, “Why are there no women in this sport?” Well, women were jumping, and they were asking to participate, but they weren’t allowed at elite levels.

As late as 2005 — 2005!!! — according to Time magazine, a member of the International Olympic Committee — a man — “said he didn't think women should ski jump because the sport ‘seems not to be appropriate for ladies from a medical point of view.’ "

Thankfully, women were finally allowed to compete in the Olympics at the 2014 games in Sochi, Russia.

But the “women are too delicate” to run/walk/fight/ski jump argument should have been put to rest decades and decades ago. It’s the same argument that was made when six-on-six basketball was devised — by men.

Now, I know I am on very thin ice, throwing shade on a hallowed Iowa institution. People wax poetic about the halcyon days of six-on-six, but it was born in sexism, it reigned in sexism, and it remains entrenched in sexism, along with people’s memories.

One of the Des Moines Register’s most read, and sometimes most reviled columnists, Donald Kaul, was famous for skewering the pace of the game, saying it was “like waiting for a bus, only with cheerleaders,” but he missed the real point.

We shortchanged our sisters and daughters. We hobbled some female athletes in being prepared for collegiate basketball. Who knows how many forerunners for Caitlin Clark never developed because they were constrained to half-court.

Institutional inertia and the fans kept coming back for six-on-six when we knew full well that women could run and jump and shoot beyond the limits that were set. To date, not one uterus has dropped out of a female running full court.

Nostalgia has a place, but we should also examine whether that nostalgia continues to be earned. Lord knows I can be nostalgic for the wrong things, too. Bugs Bunny cartoons now astonish me with their sexist AND racist tropes. Sometimes nostalgia blinds us and excuses oppression.

Please understand: None of this comes from a place of bitterness. I was tall, but I never played basketball. Never wanted to, and I never looked at six-on-six with derision in my youth.

But now, I am dumbfounded that we continue to wax rhapsodic over a tradition that made competent young women play by rules forged by men who judged them “less than.”

I have more to say on sexism in sports and the Olympics, but for now, please send all hate mail to: 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20500.

At her age, Joan Zwagerman is content to watch ski jumping and never attempt it.