I’m on the US ski jumping team

To answer some immediate questions, the title is completely true in that on paper, for a week, I am part of the US ski jumping team. It’s also not at all true, in that I do not jump, coach jumpers, provide any support to any jumpers, do anything to contribute in any way to the ski jumping effort, and in fact could not name any other member of the ski jumping team without going to Wikipedia.

Part of my job on sabbatical is to make new collaborations that allow me to branch into new areas of science, adding expertise and ultimately providing my students with more experiences. The university here in Trondheim is an international leader in exercise science. Not only is that pretty interesting to me, but my students are physical people, so this seemed like something that would draw a lot of interest from them. This year I’ve managed to cultivate two new collaborations in this area. First, at the hospital, there is a cardiovascular fitness group that does research in both the “cardiovascular fitness for regular people” space and the “cardiovascular fitness for elite athletes” space. I’m going to be working with some of their students to use machine learning to identify blood markers that correspond to longer, healthier lives, which is awesome and exciting. The other collaboration is with Olympiatoppen, which works with the Norwegian Olympic teams and universities to (a) publish papers and advance science in human performance, and (b) help Norwegians win more medals in elite competition. In particular, I’m working with the ski jumping group.

“Ski jumping group” makes it sound like a bigger operation than it really is, which is like three people who are thinking about the science of ski jumping. Ski jumping is a pretty small sport even in Norway, and it’s not getting a huge amount of resources. However, it does have a whole lot of data and a lot of obvious questions that haven’t been answered (like “how much does the wind affect a jumper”), so there’s a good opportunity for even a couple undergraduates to contribute meaningfully. Also, as a small community, pretty much everybody across the entire sport knows each other, so access is very straightforward for anybody who shows an interest.

What this meant is that after only an introductory half-hour conversation with Olympiatoppen, I was invited to be credentialed as a member of the US Ski Team for the world championships in order to be shown around and tutored in the sport. Yes, Olympiatoppen is Norwegian not American, but Norway was using all of their allocated credentials while the Americans weren’t, the American coach is himself Norwegian, they all know each other and train together anyway, yada yada yada I got in as an American.

Thursday night was the team event on the big hill. “Big hill” is an official term that also works colloquially. A good jumper will jump almost 140 meters on the big hill. The hill and in-ramp are themselves big physical presences, and when someone’s jumping, it’s a really impressive show. For the team event, each country has a team of four jumpers, each of whom jump twice – the total scores on those eight jumps is the team score.

I arrived an hour before the event, and my Norwegian host started taking me around to meet everybody and see all the spaces. My pass access was pretty comprehensive – the line to get in was long, so I just walked around to the athletes entrance to get in. We went in to the athletes’ space to see the ski grinding/waxing operation – the building had been partitioned with plywood to provide each country their own space, there was a small lounge, and a food and drink space. I don’t have many pictures because I was trying to be cool (this has never worked).

We took the ski lift to the top of the hill to meet some coaches and support staff, all of whom either already knew I was coming, or got pretty excited to hear about the project (which is good for us, but if I were told “some undergrads are going to poke at your data,” my enthusiasm would be polite but tempered).

We walked down to the judges’ center, which is where all the competition officials sit. This includes the administrative heads of the competition, the judges who award technique points, and the people who monitor the weather for the safety of the jumpers. Again, despite their importance to the coming competition, my complete irrelevance, and the fact that the biggest competition of the year was starting in five minutes, they were enthusiastic to talk with me and answer my questions.

At this point, it was time to get out of the way and watch the competition. Again, despite the fact that it was only supposed to be populated by the people running the actual event, we watched from the judges’ tower.

The US got 8th (respectable for the team), and the Norwegians got 3rd, delighting the home crowd with a podium. I decided to slum it and take the spectator bus home rather than the athletes’ bus, but not before grabbing a waffle from the athletes’ cafeteria on the way out. After all, after contributing to such an intense competition, it’s the least I deserved.