The flight for equal pay
Amid steepening gender pay gap, trailblazing ski jumpers launch a GoFundMe
This Thursday in Lake Placid, New York, just one day after National Women and Girls in Sports day, history will be made: For the first time, women ski jumpers will compete in an International Ski and Snowboard Federations (FIS) Ski Jumping World Cup event on North American snow.
Unfortunately, the event won’t quite be the celebration of equality that it should be. That’s because ski jumping is one of the only sports1 governed by FIS not to offer equal prize money for men and women.
And the gap isn’t marginal. It is, ahem, quite a leap. Right now, the female World Cup winner earns 4,300 Swiss francs2, about $4,747, compared to the CHF 13,000 earned by their male counterparts. And that’s not all. Men earn CHF 3,000 for a qualification win, while women earn absolutely nothing.
Well, that’s not quite true. A few weeks ago at a World Cup event in Germany, the women’s qualification winner was presented with a package of shampoo, lotion and four towels.
It turns out, the toiletry bag for champions caused quite a stir in German media, and elevated the outrage over inequality in the sport. So, ahead of a monumental occasion for U.S. women in ski jumping, a few trailblazers decided to take action. Together, they have started a GoFundMe to close the prize money gap in Lake Placid.
Yes, you read that right. Because the federation still won’t step up, women have taken matters into their own hands.
The idea came from retired ski jumper and current commentator Nina Lussi, a four-time national champion and Lake Placid native. She asked her former U.S. national team members Lindsey Van, Jessica Jerome, and Tara Geraghty-Moats, to help join the “flight.”
When Jerome heard about the idea, she jumped (sorry) at the opportunity.
“I was like, yes, absolutely, of course,” Jerome told Power Plays, recalling that she once got a 12-pack pallet of coca-cola for winning a competition.3 “I went through this 20 years ago, or even longer than that. It's a no brainer for me. I'm here for my girls.”
Initially, the group aimed to earn enough to present CHF 3,000 to the winner of the first women’s qualification event this weekend. Quickly, they reached that goal and surpassed it. As of publication, the GoFundMe has reached $7,727, enough to cover the qualification check for the winner of both events. The support has exceeded their expectations.
“I think the sense of community is really heartwarming,” Jerome said. “I think that women get shit done. I hope that people realize that this is something worth caring about, and we should try to make it right. Just standing by and not doing anything isn't going to cut it anymore.”
Of course, now that the qualifying champs will get more than soaps and hand towels, the women have set their sights on closing the prize money chasm. The men’s prize money pool at Lake Placid is CHF 172,000 (86,100 per event), while the women’s prize money pool is only CHF 60,458 (30,229 per event), meaning men get almost three times as much money as the women, and that doesn’t even include the qualification payment.
“This is about more than just money; it's about respect, recognition, and inspiring the next generation of ski jumpers,” Lussi said on the GoFundMe.
It has been a long, uphill climb for women in ski jumping over the decades. Women weren’t allowed to compete in the ski jumping World Cup until 2012, and weren’t allowed in the Olympics until 2014. Even then, the women only had one ski jumping event, compared to three for the men.
Many men in power are simply aghast at the thought of women competing in this sport. In 2005, then-FIS president Gian Franco Kasper told NPR that ski jumping “seems to not be appropriate for ladies from a medical point of view.” In 2014, a Russian ski jumping coach said that ski jumping wasn’t appropriate for women because “women have another purpose—to have children, to do housework, to create hearth and home.”
But despite the rampant sexism, women have kept pushing forward. Next year at the Winter Olympics, they will finally be allowed to compete on the large hill, not just the normal hill. FIS has begun holding more combined World Cup events between the men and women, which helps growth. The total women’s prize money available on the World Cup circuit has increased from CHF 690,238 in 2022 to CHF 857,096 this season. (Though that’s an increase of 166,858, while the men’s prize money pool increased by 185,300 in that time.) FIS used to only pay prize money to the top 20 finishers in women’s events; now the top 25 get checks. (For men, FIS pays out the top 30.)
This season, the top woman, Nika Prevc of Slovenia, has earned CHF 54,319, a mere 17.8 percent of the CHF 306,650 the top man, Daniel Tschofenig from Austria, has won. (And again, that doesn’t account for any money he would have earned from winning a qualification event.)
Nussi, Jerome, Van, and Geraghty-Moats know that one GoFundMe can’t fix all the systemic inequities in the sport. But they hope it helps alleviate the financial burden so many of the competitors face, raises awareness of the issue, and makes a significant statement to the governing body of the sport that there is soaring (last one, I promise) public support for these athletes, and that the time for change is now.
“Lake Placid is where I took my first jumps. It was here that I fell in love with the sport of ski jumping. It was here that I first had the dream of competing at the Olympics. It was here that the sport shaped me,” Nussi says.
“Join us. Let's make history in Lake Placid and send a powerful message to the world: it's time for equal pay in women's ski jumping.”
The other sport that doesn’t have equal pay is Nordic Combined, which (surprise!) is an event that also includes ski jumping. All other sports under FIS’s purview — Alpine skiing, cross-country, freestyle, and snowboarding — offer equal prize money.
FIS uses the Swiss franc for all of its prize money calculations. As of the time of publication, one Swiss franc is equal to 1.10 U.S. dollar. But because the exchange rate fluctuates a bit, I decided to use the Swiss franc for all of the prize money mentions in this piece, unless otherwise specified. I went back and forth on this for far too long, but I figure that the exchange rate is close enough that I should stop worrying and just pick one.
Jerome also once got a wheel of cheese instead of prize money. Which, to be fair, was absolutely delicious.
If the IOC is so concerned with gender equity, why didn’t they just say to heck with ski jumping’s legacy sport status and tell them they need to offer more for women, or cut the men? And why can’t the IOC exert pressure on FIS for the other 3 years and 50 weeks of the quad, and not recognize FIS unless they equalize opportunities and winnings?