MILAN, NH — Some of the Northeast’s best young ski jumpers flew into the country’s oldest ski club on Sunday, continuing a comeback for the once-popular winter sport that featured speed, skill and sometimes spills.
The Eastern Ski Jumping Meet took place at Nansen Ski Club in the shadow of one of the nation’s oldest jumps during the 102nd annual Milan Winter Carnival in northern New Hampshire.
The club was founded by Norwegian immigrants in the late 19th century. They built the 51-metre-high ‘Big Nansen’ jump in 1937 with government help and organized Olympic trials a year later.
At the height of the sport’s popularity in the mid-20th century, there were more than 100 jumping locations in the Northeast alone.
But decades later the sport fell out of favor and in 1980 the NCAA stopped sanctioning it as a collegiate sport.
At the time, “ABC’s Wide World of Sports” began each broadcast with the famous “pain of defeat” footage of Slovenian jumper Vinko Bogataj crashing from a jump, something that did not help the sport, the treasurer of the Nansen Ski Club said.
“It’s actually one of the factors in the decline of ski jumping, where this guy crashes every Saturday, and you think, oh my God, he must be dead,” Scott Halverson said.
Bogataj survived. And decades later, the sport is experiencing a revival. In 2011, ski jumping returned to the collegiate level and welcomed female jumpers for the first time.
There are only a dozen active ski jumping hills left in the Northeast, ranging from small high school jumps to the state-of-the-art towers in Lake Placid, New York.
In Milan, the club recovers its great leap, which has been dormant since 1985. They hope to have the structural repairs completed by next season.
And on Sunday, the Eastern Meet competitors ages 5 to 18 used two smaller jumps. Girls and women made up about 44% of competitors.
“It’s the adrenaline and the feeling of flying,” said competitor Kerry Tole, 18, a senior at Plymouth Regional High School, the only high school in the country with its own ski jump on campus.
“It’s different from alpine skiing because it’s all one big moment. “Most of the people I see at (ski jumping) clubs, especially the younger kids, are usually girls,” she said.
The longest jumper flew about half the distance of an American field on Sunday. And competitors want more.
“The kids who go off our smaller jump always point to Big Nansen and say, ‘When are we going to go off that?’” Halvorson said. “Ski jumping is definitely making a comeback and we are part of that story.”