Maren Lundby was the world’s best female ski jumper for three years, starting in 2018 when she won Olympic gold in South Korea.
At the Beijing Games, the Norwegian had a chance to become the first two-time Olympic champion in her sport. Instead, she decided to skip the World Cup season and a trip to China for the Olympics to make her physical and mental health a priority.
“I decided to not compete because I gained some weight,” Lundby said on Tuesday. “I feel like I can’t compete on the level I want to.”
Photo: EPA-EFE
Over the last few months, Lundby has emerged as an advocate for change in a sport that has historically had athletes develop eating disorders as teenagers, all in a quest to be as light as possible to squeeze a few more meters out of their flights through the air.
USA Nordic executive director Billy Demong, a five-time Olympian in Nordic combined, said that ski jumping is “one of the most eating-disorder plagued sports” because of the desire to keep pounds off.
“Fat don’t fly, things like that. That’s not something I’m ever going to let a coach say, but the athletes talk to each other and they see it on TV,” Demong said earlier this season during training in Lake Placid, New York. “Some guys took it too far, back in the day, in my era from 2000 to 2005 is when it was really bad.”
“We’re talking 6-foot [1.8m] guys that we’re like 105 to 110 pounds [47.6kg to 49.9kg],” he said. “Wildly light. Some guys could do it and somebody else would starve themselves the wrong way and they would end up in the hospital.”
The 27-year-old Lundby is the latest athlete to spark conversation about the intensity of high-level competition — and what is not working anymore for athletes concerned about their health, physical and otherwise.
US star gymnast Simone Biles withdrew from the Tokyo Olympics for the sake of her well-being following a similar move at the French Open by tennis player Naomi Osaka.
US skiing stars Mikaela Shiffrin and Jessie Diggins have talked about personal struggles; the latter also wrote a book about struggles female athletes face while dealing with unrealistic pressures to have a certain body type.
“Simone Biles, Mikaela Shiffrin, Jessie Diggins — the ones that have shared their stories with mental health — have been great,” said US ski jumper Casey Larson, who will compete in his second Olympics next month. “It definitely helped us raise the awareness for the athletes that are struggling out there. It’s a definitely a great story.”
“But at the end of the day, ski jumpers got to be skinny if you want to go far,” Larson added.
The International Ski Federation has attempted to prod athletes to make wise choices when managing their weight.
If jumpers have a body max index (BMI) of 21 or more, they can have skis as long as 145 percent of their height. The more ski surface they have, the farther they fly, but FIS requires jumpers to use shorter skis if their BMI falls below 21, which is considered a relatively healthy number for men and women.
One of the sport’s greats, Finland’s Matti Nykanen, was listed at 1.72m and 54.4kg for the 2010 Olympics; his BMI would be an “underweight” 18.5 with those numbers. Four years later, Sara Takanashi of Japan was all of 1.5m and 45.4kg, but a “healthy” BMI of 19.
Lundby said she believes that it is important to speak up about the issue of weight, adding that it is “really good to tell all the young athletes to not make stupid decisions and to suffer.”
“The changes made it easier for everybody to have the right weight, but for some, it’s still hard and quite challenging for your health in the long term,” Lundby said. “I wish it was possible to jump at higher weights, but at the moment that’s not how it is. I wish there could be some changes in the rules that would makes it easier for every athlete to be a ski jumper.”
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