Former ski jumper Toni Innauer has written an open letter to the World Ski Association. In it he expresses his concerns about women’s ski flying.
Ex-jumper and TV expert Toni Innauer sees “great risks” in women’s ski flying, wrote the 1980 Olympic champion to the FIS. Innauer, who most recently worked as an expert for ZDF, “misses the core of a balanced and responsible assessment when physical-biomechanical connections and differences and the threatening danger are negligently negated and the focus is on a gender equality debate”.
A committee of the FIS had unanimously decided that the women in the Raw Air series in spring 2023 in Norway’s Vikersund could fly from the world record bake. Innauer (64) speaks of “important biomechanical, medical and ethically moral arguments” that oppose the decision.
“The relevant difference to their male sports colleagues is not so much in the sporting ability, but in the problems to be expected with a typical ski flying fall, as Daniel Andre Tande or Thomas Morgenstern had recently experienced,” wrote Innauer. The body of a female ski jumper, “trimmed for lightweight” like that of men, is “less resilient due to the gender-specific lower proportion of muscles in the total body weight”.
In May, the FIS Commission voted for two women’s competitions in Vikersund, and the former German women’s national coach Andreas Bauer was also involved. At the time he said: “We didn’t take the decision to go ski flying for women lightly and built in a few hurdles. On the one hand you have the equality debate and on the other hand there is safety.”