Ski jumpers worried the high-flying days are over in Calgary

Ski jumpers concerned about future WinSport is planning to shut down its ski jump area and athletes are left wondering where they will train now. Shaun Frenette reports.

A group of ski jumping enthusiasts are wringing their hands after they learned that WinSport is planning to close down the iconic ski jump facility at Canada Olympic Park later this year.

Officials with the sports centre say they had made a decision to keep the jumps open back in 2015 but now, three years later, that commitment is over.

“It makes sense for us to decommission them,” says Dale Oviatt with WinSport. “We don’t know, at this point, what they will look like afterwards, but from a ski jumping perspective, it doesn’t make sense to keep them open.”

He says that ski jumping facilities are very expensive to run, costing approximately $500,000 for maintenance and operation every season.

But the money isn’t the main reason that it’s on the chopping block.

"It’s near its end of life. Its 30 years old. The 90 metre ski jump tower was obsolete two years after the Olympics. You look at other ski jump centres spending half a million dollars a year plus all the upgrades. Does that make sense from a sport and financial perspective? It’s hard to say.”

Ski jumping die-hards are working to change WinSport’s mind about the closure, saying that it is an ironic decision to make, especially with developments in Calgary’s pursuit of a 2026 Olympic bid.

"We use these facilities year round, both summer and winter jumping,” says Todd Stretch, vice-chair of Ski Jumping Canada. “There are over 8,000 jumps a year. The small bowl, specifically, allows us to develop our grassroots athletes, incrementally taking them up from one ski jump to the next.”

Stretch says that if the centre is shut down, then there would be no way to train any of the young jumpers in the area.

There is a small group that trains in Whistler, but he says that that centre lacks the ability to train year round and doesn’t have a 60 metre tower, two facets of the sport that are ‘essential’.

He says that he would like to move ahead and work with sport partners, including WinSport, to keep the facility open.

“There are a couple of moving parts with the Olympics coming forward. The venue and the facilities have yet to be announced. For us, it’s keeping the small bowl open regardless of what happens to the big towers. In the event of a successful bid, we would like to see the Olympics in Calgary, at these facilities.”

Three years ago, Stretch says a corporate sponsor came forward with a $1M grant to help cover the costs to keep the ski jump area open and hopes that they will have the same thing happen once more.

“We would love to find a sponsor to do that again. We are pursuing all avenues; we are working with Sport Canada and the government agencies and trying to work with WinSport and the local community.”

Oviatt says that WinSport’s door is never shut for the groups who want to work to keep the facility open.

“We’ll keep the conversation going, but that’s a lot of money for any group to come up with.”

Unless anything changes, WinSport plans to shut everything down in October.

(With files from Shaun Frenette)