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Sports of The Times

For Female Ski Jumpers, Agony of Exclusion Finally Ends

Jessica Jerome was one of the plaintiffs seeking to force Olympic organizers to include women’s ski jumping in the 2010 Vancouver Games.Credit...Mike Hewitt/Getty Images

Jessica Jerome was in second grade when she asked her parents if she could try ski jumping. Her father’s first thought? No way!

All Peter Jerome knew about the sport was the classic introduction of ABC’s “Wide World of Sports,” which showed “the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat.” The example of that agony was a ski jumper crashing at the end of a takeoff ramp. No chance of his daughter participating in such a dangerous enterprise.

But Jessica kept asking, and he relented. In a sport that features top jumpers who fly more than the length of a football field at more than 60 miles per hour, his little daughter took off, literally and figuratively.

She soon excelled, jumping mostly against boys, and in time she began to envision herself competing in the Olympics. And why not? Ski jumping was one of the original Olympic winter sports, held at the first Winter Games, in 1924. That dream was the beginning of Peter Jerome’s monumental 10-year campaign to help his daughter achieve her Olympic goals. Because of his efforts and the efforts of those like him — parents, athletes, coaches and other volunteers — women’s ski jumping will debut at the 2014 Sochi Games.

On Sunday, in what could be considered a holiday gift for women everywhere, American female ski jumpers will compete in their first Olympic trials, in Park City, Utah. The International Olympic Committee, with its age-old attitude of discriminating against women, should be ashamed that it took so long for this to happen.

Before letting women’s ski jumping into the Games, a decision made only in 2011, the I.O.C. put forth what seemed like a million baseless excuses, including the assertions that there weren’t enough female competitors and that those who were jumping lacked technical expertise.

In 2005, the president of the International Ski Federation, Gian-Franco Kasper, even told National Public Radio that women shouldn’t compete in Olympic ski jumping because it “seems not to be appropriate from a medical point of view.” In the old-school, old-boy network of Olympic sports, he kept his job and still runs the sport. The federation has just one woman on its 18-member leadership council, according to its website.

But parents like Peter Jerome, a pilot for Delta Air Lines, didn’t give up. Nor did their ski-jumping daughters. They fought the I.O.C. in the name of equality and, really, for all those who might want to follow in the footsteps of jumpers like Lindsey Van, the sport’s first female world champion.

Going into the Vancouver Games in 2010, Van held the record for the longest jump, by a man or a woman, on one of the hills to be used during the Olympics. Indeed, that jump, had she been allowed to duplicate it during the Games, would have put her in medal contention with the men.

Before she was so good that she could beat top men, Van was an 11-year-old phenom who said, “My goal is to make the Olympic team in 2002, for girls.” What is a parent supposed to say to that? Sorry, ski jumping in the Olympics is a dream only for boys?

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Going into the Vancouver Games in 2010, Lindsey Van held the record for the longest jump, by a man or a woman, on one of the hills to be used during the Olympics.Credit...Mike Hewitt/Getty Images

Peter Jerome initially thought it would be easy to rid ski jumping of its men-only status. He said he thought to himself, “Wow, this is so unfair and discriminatory, surely the I.O.C. will work this out any day now.” Of course, he was wrong.

The national ski federation declined to help him find funding for female ski jumpers. He studied the book “Nonprofit Kit for Dummies,” and in 2003 he formed Women’s Ski Jumping USA, which inadvertently became a women’s rights advocacy group and led the push for women’s ski jumping in the Olympics.

When the I.O.C. wouldn’t budge, Women’s Ski Jumping USA supported a group of international women — including Jessica Jerome and Van — who risked their careers to sue the Vancouver Olympics organizing committee for inclusion in its 2010 Games. They lost, but the negative publicity surrounding their lawsuit probably prompted the I.O.C. to finally let women compete, in 2014.

Van said that without Peter Jerome’s help, it would not have happened, though in an interview last week, Jerome refused to acknowledge his instrumental role. “I didn’t do much; we didn’t do much,” he said. “We just kind of shined the flashlight on the cockroaches.”

He was just doing what was right, he said, especially after seeing the inequality some of his female classmates had faced at the United States Naval Academy and after graduation. He was a member of the class of 1980, the first to accept women. He became a combat fighter pilot and saw that equally qualified women were excluded from similar jobs. He didn’t see the sense, or the justice, in that.

In speaking about those issues, Jerome, like his daughter, is usually unemotional and matter-of-fact. But last week, he choked up as he described a moment that occurred in 2011, shortly after the I.O.C. announced its decision to let female ski jumpers become Olympians.

At a fund-raising event, his daughter autographed a photograph for him with the words “To Dad, Thanks for making this happen.” As he recalled that scene, he paused to compose himself, and then apologized for letting his feelings show.

For the Jerome family, it has been a long, sometimes difficult path, but one that allowed the family to create new opportunities in the sport, no thanks to the I.O.C., which still — for 90 years now — hasn’t offered women equal chances to compete at the Winter Games.

Nordic combined, which involves ski jumping and cross-country skiing, still excludes women. And in ski jumping, the women will compete in only one event, the normal hill. The men will compete in two more: the large hill and the team competition. Something is wrong with that picture, too, and the I.O.C. should correct it. But at least in Sochi, the female jumpers will make a historic first leap.

A few weeks ago, one of my colleagues showed our department a video he had taken of one of the top American ski jumpers. At the top of the takeoff ramp, you couldn’t tell the person’s sex — aside from the sleek powder-blue suit and hot-pink gloves.

When the jumper reached the bottom of the ramp and rocketed into the air, I got goose bumps. After all those Saturdays as a kid watching “Wide World of Sports” with my father, I had never seen a woman fly.

Now this, I thought, is the thrill of victory.

Email: juliet@nytimes.com

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section B, Page 9 of the New York edition with the headline: The Agony and the Thrill. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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