Women’s Giant Slalom and Slalom Podiums Photos: Agence Zoom
February 8, 2024 — Yesterday, National Girls & Women in Sports Day celebrated the accomplishments of girls and women in sports. It highlighted the positive influence of sports participation and acknowledged the ongoing struggle for women’s equality in sports. President Ronald Reagan established this day when he signed a proclamation in 1987. And yet it would seem, even 37 years later, in 2024, gender equality is still a struggle in ski racing.
The 2024 FIS Junior World Ski Championships in Portes du Soleil, France, showcased the men’s slalom and giant slalom competitions on the big screen beneath the racecourses and livestreamed them on YouTube with professional commentating and slick camera work. However, the women’s tech events were not broadcasted. Ski racing fans around the globe searched the FIS site for livestreams to no avail. A dustup ensued on social media, with dozens of comments posted about the gender inequity represented by the lack of coverage of the women’s events.
Athletes respond
Ed Guigonnet, a 22-year-old Great Britain racer, was among the first to post about it. “I feel disappointed that, during the 2024 WJSC, only the men’s technical events have been broadcast, leaving the women’s performances totally out of the show … I feel for the women athletes that put out some amazing performances that nobody managed to see. If you broadcast the event, you need to show both genders or don’t show anything. Hopefully, my voice can be heard, and other athletes can speak up to try and make things move on!”
Click on images to enlarge
Guigonnet messaged fellow GB ski racer and Olympian Charlie Guest about his post. “To see the younger boys stepping up for the girls is a really cool moment,” Guest said. “Women’s sport needs male allies.” She then added her voice to the conversation by posting a letter of protest to FIS. With 10.9K followers on Instagram, Guest gained immediate traction with her post.
“Through the course of the championship, we were able to have fantastic access to almost all of the races via livestream,” Guest wrote. But she called out FIS for the lack of coverage for the women’s slalom and giant slalom events, despite livestreaming being available for both the men’s slalom and giant slalom. “The baffling choice to omit women’s racing from a worldwide audience has sent a damaging message to female alpine racers of all ages,” she wrote
The message, Guest said, was that “female athletes are not valued, female athletes are not deserving of a space in the spotlight, and that the career and results of female racers are irrelevant and unimportant.” She called the lack of coverage a “blatant move of sheer inequality.”
In less than a week, Guest’s post racked up 10.2K likes and nearly 300 comments, including comments from ski racers like Austria’s Anna Veith and Eva-Maria Brem, Americans Paula Moltzan and Foreste Peterson, and Canadians Britt Richardson and Sarah Bennett. Athletes who know the power of the media. “This is about athletes who’ve missed opportunities. This is about Britt Richardson, who won the giant slalom at Junior Worlds,” Guest said. “She’s not going to be able to take that footage to potential sponsors in the future and say, ‘This is what I did.’ Women can’t get the same level of sponsors because they’re quite literally not being given the same platform as men.”
To be sure, the Junior World Champs is a big platform. The fourth biggest competition in ski racing (after the Olympics, the World Championships, and the World Cup), the JWSC brought together 600 of the best U21 ski racers from 54 nations to compete in front of large crowds.
It’s a race environment unlike those experienced by most junior in their young careers. “At the time, I didn’t necessarily think anything of it because the majority of my races aren’t televised,” said U.S. athlete Mary Bocock. “However, when the men were at the same mountain the next day and had coverage, I was a little disappointed that the people from home didn’t get to watch my sister and I race the GS. Especially because Elisabeth did so well.”
Lindsey Vonn comments
On Sunday evening, ski-racing legend Lindsey Vonn reposted Guest’s post to her story and added several comments to the thread. Vonn highlighted that the coverage decision was probably made at the local organizing committee level, not by FIS. “Trust me when I say FIS is doing its best to get as many races of both genders televised. Not many places even have the money to host the WJC, let alone pay for them to be televised. We need an overall system to figure out how we economically make it work. To simply blame FIS is not the smartest route,” Vonn posted.
“The skiing community is powerful, and they want to see change,” Guest said. Here’s a sampling of online comments as ski racers and ski-racing fans from across the globe weighed in:
@btheski:
Congrats to all athletes who participated, particularly the women who skied in unnecessary obscurity. 🙌🔥
@hurjanharmaan_villat
Why are only men’s competitions streamed and women’s are not? Are young women’s competitions not as important as men’s? Why does FIS allow this gender-based discrimination?
@gipal63
SCANDALOSO che preferite fare gli uomini in dretta streaming ben due volte su due. 😢
(Google translation: SCANDALOUS that you prefer men to be in livestreaming two times out of two.😢)
@patti_smith_16121
Would have LOVED to see the women compete – shame on FIS and organizers for that massive miss.
FIS responds
FIS also responded on Instagram to Guest’s post in the comments: “Dear Charlie, we acknowledge that livestreaming only the men`s slalom and giant slalom is not in line with the FIS values of equal opportunities and gender balance. At FIS, we should have pushed harder to provide the same exposure opportunities to women as for men. We will take your feedback as a reminder for being true to accelerating and promoting female participation here in the future.”
In another Instagram comment thread, FIS responded to Canadian World Cup ski racer Sarah Bennett (@sarahbenski) “There is at the end of the day no excuse for this. The reason was an overlapping program at two different locations at the exact same time! The organizing committee did not have the resources to run two livestreams at the same time. We already have and we will address this. We are not in control of every single aspect of such an event and we do strive for the best promotion of the sport for both genders equally!”
On February 5, FIS issued an official statement to address the backlash. “FIS acknowledges that livestreaming only the men’s slalom and giant slalom at the Alpine Junior World Ski Championships is not in line with the FIS values of equal opportunity and gender equality. FIS should have insisted on the same broadcast exposure for the women’s competitions, and we are taking the feedback we have received to heart. We will focus on promoting all FIS competitions and FIS athletes equally in the future to avoid any kind of similar situation in the future,” the statement reads. “FIS looks forward to improving its live event coverage and, moving ahead, ensuring that all athletes and events will have the same broadcast exposure regardless of the circumstances.”
FIS encouraged Guest by acknowledging they had made a mistake and pledged to push harder for LOCs to show both genders equally. However, she felt the statement lacked genuine commitment. “I’d really like to see a policy in place to make sure that in any championships going forward that, this never happens again,” Guest said.
French Federation responds
On the same day FIS made its statement, the French Federation issued a press release from the Junior World Championship organizing committee, providing several explanations for the gender imbalance in streaming the tech events. “Broadcasting choices had to be made taking into account a number of factors … The fact that competitions were spread over several sites (Avoriaz, Châtel, Les Gets, Morzine, St Jean d’Aulps), some of which financed the video streaming, and the technical impossibility for our production team to be present at several sites at the same time.”
The organizing committee pointed out that logistical constraints combined with an additional cost of €30,000 to livestream all the tech races was prohibitive. “The WJC2024 Organizing Committee is not in a position to finance this expense on its own, and in the absence of financial aid for broadcasting from ski institutions, it has been forced to make choices in an attempt to cover the event as well as possible.”
Many online posters suggested that if a lack of resources was the reason for limiting the number of livestreams, the LOC could have chosen to livestream one men’s and one women’s tech race. They suggested that the camera infrastructure could have been left in place at St. Jean d’Aulps, where the GS races were held for both genders.
Organizing Committee apologizes
In addition to explaining its rationale behind the broadcast decisions, the LOC offered this somewhat muted apology: “We believe we have risen to the challenge in sporting terms and mobilized all the resources at our disposal for media coverage. We sincerely regret the controversy raised by the live broadcasts and believe it is important to pay more attention in the future to gender equality, but also to equality between disciplines.”
“There’s a sort of oblique apology in there somewhere,” Guest said, “but you’re actually going to put discipline equality above female equality?” Guest says not streaming the women’s races can potentially affect the next generation. Young girls missed the chance to watch ski heroes like Albania’s Lara Colturi and Latvia’s Dženifera Ģērmane. “The bottom line is that FIS needs to have it in writing with any local organizing committee that if you’re broadcasting, coverage needs to be 50-50,” Guest said. “And there needs to be an apology to the athletes who were snubbed and have missed opportunities because they haven’t been given the platform they deserve.”
###