The Insane Nordic Skiing

:date: 2024-05-25 14:03 :tags:

Let's have a quick review of what Nordic skiing is: the toes are attached to the ski and the heel is not. In Alpine skiing both the heel and toes are attached to the ski. It's a fair approximation to say that cross country skiing is the same as Nordic skiing, but just as eutherian mammals (placental, live bearing) are not all of the mammals, there exist some kinds of very weird Nordic skiing.

For example, Telemark is a type of skiing where people generally go to Alpine ski mountains and ski down them with a binding system that does not attach the heel firmly to the ski. They're like the marsupials of Nordic skiing.

Monotremes are freaky egg laying mammals, notably the platypus and echidna. The monotreme equivalent of Nordic skiing is ski jumping. There are actually two variants: official proper ski jumping and the unrestrained full gonzo madness of ski flying. I can not really figure out the technical details differentiating the two but apparently as things got more and more insane, the FIS started to get nervous about the jumps getting longer and longer with no end in sight and put down some rules to limit the danger for "jumping". Which is a bit like the time I had to wear a life jacket on a boat tour of the Iguazu River at the top of the largest waterfall system in the world. But whatever.

Here are some more fun facts about ski jumping. As with most skiing topics, Norwegians started it; they still have a giant jump visible in the background of their Holmenkollen cross-country skiing events. But for whatever weird reason, Austrians and Slovenians love this sport and dominate it. It is these two nations who are also into ski flying and keep building bigger and bigger nonsensical jumps to outdo one another. This year, Red Bull sponsored a push to increase the ski flying record to a distance of 291m (a video about that).

While the crazy ski flying is not a Winter Olympic sport, a country that wants to win a lot of medals is well advised to get some kind of decent ski jump because not only are there all the medals you can rack up in ski jumping itself, there's another Olympic sport called Nordic combined which is a double event of a cross country ski race where you get a head start if you can do a good job jumping off of one of these crazy jumping ramps. There are two hill sizes and a team event at the Olympics, so for men and women, that's six medals on offer for the sport of Nordic combined. A sport you may never have heard of.

Where does that leave the USA? Well, the USA definitely likes to win medals at the Winter Olympics. But despite Americans' love of jumping motorized vehicles, ski jumping is not exactly a big topic with people in most of the US. There are exceptions however!

Yesterday I was in Iron Mountain, Michigan and I thought it would be cool to check out their world class ski jumping facility, the Pine Mountain Ski Jump. I was not disappointed! This is definitely a thing that must be seen in person to appreciate. Here is a photo of me doing that.

Note the flag signaling a massive crosswind and imagine flying off this crazy thing into that wind. No. Thank. You.

But wow. To see and appreciate the size of this thing in person really helps put this sport into perspective. I was thinking of how it would be to just ski straight down the landing hill with none of the complications of flying and it seemed pretty terrifying. To imagine being in literal free fall down this slope is definitely amazing.

The view from the launch point where they have the observation deck that I'm on is spectacular. Here is a shot found on the internet of what it looks like from the top where the skiers start. You can see the observation deck on the left side and see how much higher the ramp is.

And here's what the whole facility looks like in winter with proper snow on it.

What if you're in the USA and you want to do some full on crazy ski flying? Well, for that, you'll have to go a little farther down the road to the continent's only proper ski flying ramp at Copper Peak just north of Ironwood, MI.

I love skiing. I love Nordic skiing. But this is insane! Still, it's quite a thing to behold and when the annual FIS Ski Jumping Continental Cup competition comes around in February, there's a decent chance I'll want to see a mad Slovenian or two actually do this crazy thing.