Not to be outdone by the French pole-vaulter from the 2024 Paris Olympics, the upcoming Milano Cortina Winter Olympics has its own groin-related debacle. Two coaches and an equipment manager on the Norwegian ski-jumping team have been suspended for 18 months for allegedly adding extra stitching to the crotch area of their athletes’ suits to make them slightly bigger. No, not for vanity reasons.
Unlike the case with the Frenchman, in ski jumping, it apparently does help to have some extra surface area on your bulge. This all started last year, when Magnus Brevig, the head coach of the Norwegian national team, and Adrian Livelten, Norway’s suit technician, were caught on video adding stitching to the suits of Marius Lindvik and Johann André Forfang, two of the country’s star ski jumpers. (Thomas Lobben, an assistant coach, was not in the video but later confessed to being part of the scheme.) The video, taken at the Nordic World Ski Championships in Trondheim, Norway, showed the men manipulating the crotch of a suit after it had already been inspected.
For their parts, Lindvik and Forfang both pleaded ignorance to the crotch-enlarging plot and were served with a three-month suspension that they are allowed to take in the summer. Both athletes are expected to compete in the Olympics next month.
But why would anyone be adding stitches to the suits in the first place? To win, of course. As The Athletic explains it, a larger suit means that a jumper can fly farther through the air — like how a bigger sail will make a boat move more quickly. Because of this, there are rules that state an athlete’s suit cannot be more than four centimeters larger than the surface area of their body. As little as one extra centimeter can add five meters of length to their jump. And, apparently, it’s not uncommon — according to one German tabloid, some skiers even go as far as to use hyaluronic acid-filled sleeves to manipulate the size of their crotch.
Lasse Ottesen, an Olympic silver medalist in ski jumping who now works on inspection protocols in the sport, told The Athletic that the Norwegians had also made the suits stiffer, which can create less drag in the air. “They had opened up the five different layers of the material,” Ottesen said, and “entered in a different kind of material, a stiff material, then they had sewn back the material together and then sewn the suit together. So for a normal eye or even for our equipment controllers, not possible to see.” Otteson added that this was ”on a totally different level of what has been done before.”
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At least, that’s what the Establishment is saying. According to the coaches who are facing a career-ending penalty, this kind of cheating is par for the course. “They argue that it is part of an established culture within ski jumping, one that has not previously been harshly penalized,” Pål Kleven, a lawyer working with the athletes, said of the coaches in a statement to The Athletic. “They could not have reasonably known that their actions would lead to such a harsh penalty, as the FIS has historically not enforced severe sanctions for similar offenses.” Damn, it really sucks to be the people who get caught.
The scandal has startled the Norwegian ski-jumping community so much that the FIS instituted new rules surrounding the suits. At a control checkpoint, two FIS controllers and a doctor will now evaluate the suit using 3-D measurements to make sure everything is where it should be. Once they’re checked out, tamperproof microchips will be put onto the suits, and scanners will be able to tell if the chips are where they’re supposed to be before and after the jump.
Perhaps this is a good lesson for everyone, not just professional ski jumpers: Don’t try to manipulate your crotch area. Even if you wish it were a little bigger, it’s probably not worth it. You just have to rock with what you’ve been given and trust that pure skill can get you where you need to go. It’s not about the size of the suit, but the motion of the … ski jump.
