White (Wo)men Can't Jump: So What?

Canada's female ski jumpers are outraged that their sport won't be included in the program for the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver. This page is tossing this one on the boo-fricking-hoo pile. It's not that Katie Willis, her Mother Jan Willis, and her 'fellow' athletes don't have a case: It's hypocritical of the IOC to claim that Women's Ski Jumping requires two world championships be staged before 2010, while at the same time the Women's Marathon had only one world championship before its inclusion in the 1984 Summer Games in Los Angeles. Mind you, in the era of tit-for-tat Cold War boycotts, the Olympics was probably looking for a few more higher, faster, stronger bodies to put in front of the TV cameras.

Jan Willis filed a Federal Human Rights complaint, to which Ottawa smartly told the athletes to take it up with the IOC. This page isn't exactly optimistic with their chances in persuading an organization which was ruled for decades by one of Francisco Franco's lieutenants, and lets the Olympic Torch be carried to the site of Tiannmen Square Massacre this summer. Human Rights and the Olympics go together like Oil and the Bush Administration.

The plight of Women's Ski Jumping puts the 'con' in controversy - this non-issue is meant to distract the audience from the REAL human rights issues surrounding the 2010 Olympics: the eradication of social housing, the criminalization of homelessness, the ongoing blind eye to sex tourism, the expansion of military and police power (which resulted in the death of Harriet Nahanee in a Vancouver prison cell, whose only crime was wishing to preserve Eagleridge Bluffs from a bulldozer), and the outright lack of accountability in the planning and construction of the various Olympic megaprojects.

The lack of Women's Ski Jumping at the 2010 Olympics is a sporting and political issue, and will be resolved by the 2014 Sochi Games. Jan Willis and her ilk should take it as an inconvenience and not some kind of tragedy. The real human rights issues of the Olympics will be with us much longer.