The anticipated first event of the Winter Olympics was reduced to a great anticlimax Friday when officials shut down the 90-meter ski-jump competition before it began.
They didn’t want a jumper sailing into the crowd in 50 m.p.h. winds.
Although the description sounds more like a comic parody of the event, fear of just such an occurrence kept the 60 jumpers grounded at Utah Olympic Park. The scheduled qualification on the “normal hill” was bumped to Sunday and will be held before the finals.
Could someone truly be blown so far off course?
“If he were jumping,” Alan Johnson, manager of the ski-jump site, said without a hint of a smile.
Blizzard-like, whiteout conditions greeted athletes, race officials and the 13,582 ticket-holders hours before the scheduled 9 a.m. start, resulting in two postponements before the cancellation. The ticket-holders will be offered refunds from the Salt Lake Olympic Committee.
“We were a determined lot today,” said Colin Hilton, Utah Olympic Park general manager. “We were really hoping to get this off.”
Johnson, who has supervised the site since it opened in 1993, said this is only the second time in nine years that the winds reached such a high velocity. By the time the competition was put off the sun broke through, but Johnson said neither the snow itself nor visibility were really factors–just wind.
Johnson said three weather stations on the course measured wind velocity at 50-plus m.p.h. An acceptable breeze for ski jumping–if it’s steady– is perhaps 15 m.p.h., he said.
“We can jump at anything up to an inch and a half an hour,” Johnson said of snowfall.
The event was expected to garner extra attention because it was the first competition of the Salt Lake Games and the only competition scheduled on the day of the Opening Ceremony. Men’s and women’s downhill ski training at Snowbasin Ski Area also was called off.
The ski-jump qualification round was designed to trim 10 competitors from the final and complete a mandatory round of jumping before the final. Athletes were disappointed, but they said holding an event in such poor conditions would have resulted in an unfair competition.
“I’m a little bummed out about it,” said U.S. jumper Brendan Doran of Steamboat Springs, Colo. “But it happens that way and we certainly can’t control the weather.”
Alan Alborn of Anchorage, the top U.S. jumper, called “weather like this near impossible to jump in.”
Winter Olympics or not, wintry conditions have been known to disrupt outdoor events.
The ski-jumping portion of the nordic combined at the 1988 Games in Calgary was postponed more than once, Johnson pointed out. The downhill in Nagano, Japan, in 1998 also had multiple delays.
About 21,000 fans are expected for Sunday’s medal round. Johnson said the weather forecast is good: Sunshine and winds that might not even rustle wind chimes are expected.
