This historic moment is the product of generations of trailblazing women, even as Lake Placid plays a vital role in developing the next generation of jumpers.

Adalina Weibrecht and Willow Howe are two of the girls in the U10 age group of the New York Ski Educational Foundation’s youth ski jumping program. They start out their practice by stretching and jumping over a series of hurdles, practicing their launching position by squatting low with their hands back by their sides. Then they suit up and lug their skis to the two small hills.

After a few runs on the 20-meter hill, one of their coaches, Jay Rand, asks if they want to do a jump or two off the next size hill — the 48-meter.

“Is that even a question?” Adalina, who is the daughter of local Olympian Andrew Weibrecht and also Rand’s granddaughter, responds. “Yes!”

Willow Howe jumps off the 20-meter hill at the Olympic Jumping Complex at a practice on Tuesday. She recently placed second in her age group at a competition in Connecticut. (Enterprise photo — Grace McIntyre)

The kids’ other coach, Larry Stone, is a longtime feature of the ski jumping community, having coached the U.S. ski team at numerous points in his career. He is also one of the reasons competitive women’s ski jumping even exists in the first place. For Stone, this week has been gratifying, but a long-time coming.

“It was a long fight,” Stone said. “There was a lot of resistance.”

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Breaking in

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Willow Howe, left, and Adalina Weibrecht talk with NYSEF program coordinator Kaileigh Moore before going off the 48-meter hill at a practice at the jumping complex on Thursday, Jan. 30. (Enterprise photo — Grace McIntyre)

In his words, Stone “fell into” training women’s ski jumpers in the 1990s. He assembled a team of girls and took them on “tours” to different ski jumps, organizing informal competitions starting in 1995. This team included his daughter, Molly Stone, and future world champion Lindsey Van.

“I always thought they could do this sport and do it well,” Stone said.

He isn’t sure why, for so many years, most of the other people in the ski jumping world seemed to think otherwise. Maybe it was the remnants of myths about the female body — Stone remembers hearing concerns about women landing so hard their ovaries would come out. But mostly, Stone and the athletes he coached think it comes down to stubbornness and tradition.

Finally, in 2009, women were added to the FIS Nordic World Ski Championships. Van — who Stone refers to as his daughter, having coached her from a young age in Park City and hosted her when she came to train in Lake Placid — was the first women’s champion. Women were added to the world cup circuit in 2011.

Van and her teammate, Jessica Jerome, met Stone as they were coming up together in a ski jumping program in Park City. Prior to 2009, the informal championships felt like a “sideshow” to the men’s competition, Van said. The world championships changed that, at least in some ways.

From left, former U.S. ski jumpers Nina Lussi, Tara Geraghty-Moats, Lindsey Van and Jessica Jerome surround the winner of the women’s qualifying competition at the FIS Ski Jumping World Cup, Eirin Maria Kvandal (middle), who is from Norway. The former jumpers presented Kvandal with a check from a crowd-sourced fundraiser aimed at leveling the pay between the male and female qualifiers. (Provided photo — ORDA)

“It was pretty wild,” Van said. “It finally felt like people respected us a little bit more.”

However, inequalities remained. Women were consistently paid less for winning competitions, if they were paid at all. Van pulls up a photo of Jerome on her phone, taken after a competition with her arms full of a 12-pack of off-brand Coke, which was the grand prize for winning. To make matters worse, ski jumping is relatively unknown in the U.S., so it was much harder for the women to get sponsorships like their European competitors had.

“We used to refer to ourselves as ‘team hobo,'” Jerome said. “We would show up to competitions with mismatched uniforms from the year before.”

Jerome’s father was a Delta Airlines pilot, so sometimes they would fly on buddy passes instead of using real plane tickets. Traveling for competitions was a huge expense for their families — an expense that athletes incur regardless of gender.

“When we competed, we were used to getting nothing,” Jerome said. “If we got cash, it was a good day.”

Willow Howe prepares for a jump off the 20-meter hill at the Olympic Jumping Complex on Thursday, Jan. 30. (Enterprise photo — Grace McIntyre)

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‘Halfway between generations’

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Nina Lussi’s story is a “classic Lake Placid” one. At age 8, she started ski jumping in NYSEF’s “Learn to Fly” program, tagging along with her younger brother. At that age, Lussi doesn’t remember being aware of the opportunities women had, or didn’t have, to compete in the Olympics or in the world cup circuit. For the most part, jumping was just another fun thing to do after school.

“This was something to do in the dark winter months of the Adirondacks,” she said.

NYSEF coach Larry Stone reviews videos with Adalina Weibrecht, left, and Willow Howe after they jump off the 20-meter hill at the Olympic Jumping Complex on Thursday, Jan. 30. (Enterprise photo — Grace McIntyre)

But as she improved, Lussi had more opportunities to travel. As a young teenager, she went to Europe for the first time, competing in the Junior World Championships in 2009. At age 16, she started to attend a ski academy in Austria.

“I was ready to see the world and pursue my dreams,” Lussi said. “It was around that time that I started watching the pieces start to fall into place.”

Lussi was reaching the height of her competition right as women’s ski jumping was entering the world scene. She was at the first-ever Olympic trials for the 2014 Games in Sochi.

“I feel like I was halfway between generations,” she said. “The generation before me did a lot of the legwork for me to be able to have those opportunities.”

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Still fighting to be seen

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The pioneers of women’s ski jumping have some mixed emotions as they return to Lake Placid, this time helping FIS as licensed technical delegates, to watch young women compete in a historical event.

“I’m super jealous of these girls,” Van said. “It’s something we always wanted to jump in, especially in our home country, and we never had that chance.”

However, they realize how important it is for the people, and the kids, in the U.S. to be reminded of what the pinnacle of ski jumping looks like. They said it’s hard for young athletes to be motivated to stay in a sport when they never see what high level competitions look like.

“That was the catch-22 of women’s ski jumping for a long time,” Jerome said. “Super talented women would quit because there was no future in the sport, straight up. It was sort of a ‘if you build it, they will come’ mentality.”

Members of the U.S. ski jumping team competing in Lake Placid this weekend hope this event will bring more visibility to their sport. At age 22, Paige Jones has been a part of her fair share of historical “firsts” for women’s ski jumping. In 2021, she was the first woman to jump from the large hill in a competition.

Jones and her teammates have competed, or at least trained, in Lake Placid before. Some of them are seeing their family for the first time in months, and any competition in the U.S. feels like a home crowd to them. It’s also a community that has rallied behind them.

A little over a week ago, Lussi and her teammates created a GoFundMe with the goal of equalizing the pay between male and female winners of the qualification round. Typically, women tend to make about one-third of what male jumpers make at the same level, if they get paid at all. At a World Cup event in Germany last month, CNN reported that while the winner of the men’s qualifying round received over $3,000 in cash, the female top qualifier was given bottles of shampoo, shower gel and four hand towels.

The GoFundMe surpassed its original goal, aided by ORDA’s commitment to contributing proceeds from ticket sales. On Thursday night, they were able to present the winner of the women’s qualification round with a cash prize equal to that of the men’s.

According to ORDA spokesperson Darcy Norfolk, a second effort led by U.S. Ski & Snowboard, along with ORDA and USA Ski Jumping, has taken off. Their goal is for all athletes to be recognized equally for their achievement at this weekend’s World Cup.

“For them to not be able to earn a living being the best in the world at their sport — it’s a real shame,” Lussi said. “This is our way of saying that we believe in you and you deserve more. It’s as pure as that, really.”