Answer to Map #110
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Answer: This week’s map was a dot map depicting all of the full-size operational venues around the world where you could go ski jumping.
Ski jumping got its start in Norway, where the original hills for it were constructed in Oslo. The Holmenkollen ski jumping venue in Oslo is a frequent host of major ski jumping championships. The companion sport of “ski flying,” which is really just ski jumping off an even bigger hill, got its start in the 1930s in Planica, which was then in Yugoslavia but which is now in Slovenia. Our dot map reflects the places where ski jumping is taken especially seriously as a sport: Scandinavia, parts of Eastern Europe, and the Alps. Planica has hosted the final stage of the ski jumping world cup every year since the 2012–2013 season, since it routinely attracts tens of thousands of cheering spectators to the event.
Ski jumping is also popular in Japan. Japan had only ever won one medal at the Winter Olympics before Sapporo hosted the games in 1972. In that year’s normal hill ski jumping event, the Japanese athletes swept the podium, quadrupling Japan’s all-time Winter Olympic medal haul. The East Asian countries on this map should have been a useful hint, since three of the five dots in the region are in recent Olympic host cities: Sapporo and Nagano in Japan, as well as PyeongChang in South Korea. Another dot will be added soon in the mountains near-ish to Beijing, which will host the 2022 Winter Olympics.
But way too may people guessed that these dots represented the hosts of the Winter Olympics. There are far too many dots for this to have been the case! Far, far too many! There are also a lot of countries with dots on this map that have never hosted the Winter Olympics, including Turkey, Kazakhstan, and Romania. And, for that matter, Slovenia (seven dots) and Finland (five dots).
In the United States, there are some places where you can try out ski jumping. Only two of them (Salt Lake City and Lake Placid) are in places that have hosted the Winter Olympics. Squaw Valley, California, built a ski jumping venue for the 1960 Winter Olympics, but the jumps were eventually demolished. This stands in contrast to the story behind Map #29, our map of functional bobsleigh tracks. The Squaw Valley organizers, in an effort to save money, never built a bobsleigh track at all. But the overarching point remains the same: building and maintaining the infrastructure necessary to host the Winter Olympics is and has always been extremely expensive. It’s one thing to do so in a place where ski jumping is a spectator sport that attracts tens of thousands of fans. It’s another to try to build interest in the sport from scratch.
Ski jumping is America’s worst Olympic sport. In 1924, at the very first Winter Olympics, Norwegian-born American Anders Haugen won a bronze medal. Gold and silver, naturally, went to Norwegians. Haugen wasn’t even given his bronze medal for fifty years, however, because of a scoring error that wasn’t uncovered until 1974. Haugen had learned ski jumping in Norway before immigrating to Milwaukee, where he built a ski jump in an effort to teach Americans about the sport. He was deeply involved in promoting ski jumping in Colorado and California as well, but his efforts never produced the kind of enthusiasm that the sport enjoys in his native Norway. No American has won an Olympic medal in ski jumping since.
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