fielding questions about whether or not the organisation was investigating reports<\/a> that some jumpers had started injecting hyaluronic acid into their penises to make them bigger.<\/p>\nNo one in the ski-jumping community wants to discuss this. The federation that runs the sport says it is just a \u201cwild rumour\u201d. But the unfortunate truth is that the sport, and the Norwegian team in particular, has invited all this speculation after two of their athletes, Marius Lindvik and\u00a0Johann\u00a0Andr\u00e9 Forfang, were banned for three months after their coaches were caught sewing extra material into the athletes\u2019 jumpsuits at the World Cup last year. Someone, and no one ever seems to have found out who, posted an online video of them doing furtive things with a sewing machine.<\/p>\n
A Norway coach uses a flag to signal when it\u2019s good to jump. Photograph: Tom Jenkins\/The Guardian<\/p>\n
In the beginning the coach denied it. But when he came clean, he and two of the support staff \u2013 including the team tailor \u2013 were banned for a year and a half. The athletes got off with three months because they claimed to be oblivious to what was going on. Which is how they came to be back competing in the Olympic normal hill competition on Monday evening (normal, it has to be said is a very relative concept in this sport).<\/p>\n
It was a national scandal in Norway, which is the proudest, and most successful, of all the Winter Olympic countries. The Norwegians have won more medals in ski jumping than anyone else, and Lindvik is the current Olympic champion in the long hill. As funny as you and I might think this is, ski jumping is a beloved sport in the handful of countries that practise it, and the Norwegian fans I talk to about it during the Olympic competition don\u2019t enjoy becoming a punchline. \u201cI don\u2019t want to talk about it,\u201d one tells me. \u201cIt\u2019s all behind us now,\u201d is the only thing another will say. \u201cIt\u2019s sad, very, very sad,\u201d says a third.<\/p>\n
By the end of the night I\u2019m beginning to understand more about why they\u2019re so upset. Ski jumping is a great evening out. In Predazzo, where the Olympic competition is taking place, a big, happy band of fans from across Europe, North America and Japan are knocking back beers and hotdogs and shouting out at the athletes as they fly through the night. People are blowing horns, and banging cowbells. It\u2019s an easy sport to love, and an astonishing one to watch.<\/p>\n
But the truth is no one really knows if this scandal is \u201cbehind us\u201d or not. The federation insists it is, but a lot of the sport\u2019s former stars have spoken out about stretching the rules themselves, partly out of a desire to take the heat off the men who have been banned, and partly as a call to reform the sport. The former Olympic medallists Johan Remen Evensen, Anders Jacobsen and Daniel-Andr\u00e9 Tande all told the Norwegian broadcaster NRK that cheating was common during their careers. They spoke about how jumpers used to wear suits with low-slung crotches, or tug their underpants down by their knees to stretch out their trousers then tuck them up again during inspections.<\/p>\n
German fans enjoy the ski jumping at Predazzzo. Photograph: Tom Jenkins\/The Guardian<\/p>\n
Then Switzerland\u2019s former world champion Andreas K\u00fcttel said he had been doing it, too. He admitted he used to spray his suit with hairspray before competitions, to stop the air from passing through it.<\/p>\n
The margins in ski jumping are so small, the stakes so high, and the sport is so sensitive to the tiniest variations of physics, that the athletes are always looking to game the rules. In the early 2000s, there were a series of scandals involving the suits and bindings, and in the late 2000s another involving extreme weight loss, which lead to widespread problems with eating disorders among the competitors. This problem still exists, despite the federation bringing in rules around the body mass index of the jumpers. Federations are perpetually caught in trying to find better ways to regulate the sport as the athletes look for new loopholes.<\/p>\n
This one will pass. Then another will come. And in the end these few months will be remembered as a brief moment \u2013 the briefs moment \u2013 in the history of the sport.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Yes, it\u2019s time to talk about the ski jumpers\u2019 penises. Although to be honest the ski jumpers themselves…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":289666,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[61,60,112],"class_list":{"0":"post-289665","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-sports","8":"tag-ie","9":"tag-ireland","10":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/289665","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=289665"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/289665\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/289666"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=289665"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=289665"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=289665"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}