The young men of U.S. Ski Jumping, who I chronicled in a feature last week, didn’t win any medals at the Vancouver games, nor were they expected to. But they won something just as important: a bet with the Canadian team.
The wager? The losers of the ski jumping team competition had to chug a bottle of maple syrup. The U.S. finished 11th with 340 points. Canada finished last in 12th place with 294.6 points. Who knew Stephen Colbert would be so right when he jokingly called Canadians “syrup-suckers.”
"It's just fun," said Peter Frenette, the youngest male on the entire U.S. Olympic team; he celebrates his 18th birthday today. "Team events are always fun.”
Both the American and Canadian teams are young and underfunded by almost any standard—whether compared to American and Canadian teams in other disciplines or other European ski jumping teams who seem to have buckets of money to spend. The Austrian jumpers, who won gold in the team competition, travel the world in a $700,000 tour bus, while the Canadian team was allocated just $82,500 of the much ballyhooed “Own the Podium” funding; their Alpine ski team got $3.5 million, according to CTV. Worse, the U.S. team receives no national funding from the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Association.
“To even have three Americans here is huge,” said Anders Johnson, the team’s sole Olympic veteran. “We're basically just a back-woods club team right now that qualified three people from the U.S.”
The three American jumpers—Nick Alexander, Peter Frenette and Anders Johnson—weren’t even expected to compete in the team event, which requires four members. But at the last moment, the team “borrowed” 19-year-old Taylor Fletcher from the Nordic combined team to fill out their under-21 roster when International Ski Federation officials allowed the U.S. to enter on Monday.
"I've known them for quite a while," said Fletcher, who tried to “stay out of” the bet. "We're all really good friends and all having a blast."
With their Olympic competition finished, the team is looking ahead to the future and growing the program.
"Everybody had a good experience here, and Peter and Nick Alexander had really, really good jumps here," said U.S. Ski Jumping Head Coach Jochen Dannenberg. "I think they have a good future in ski jumping."
"I'd like to see the U.S. being up there," Alexander said. "It's going to take a while, but I'd like to see us up there at the top."
It’ll take some work—and funding—to catch up with the sport-dominating Europeans: Austria won gold, Germany silver and Norway bronze. But the double-medal success of the U.S. Nordic combined team—who were once in a similar situation—shows it can be done.
Stephen Colbert, are you listening?
Follow Karla’s Olympic coverage right here, at RunKarlaRun.com and Twitter@KBruning.
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