The Psychology of Jumping

LILLEHAMMER, Norway -- At the bottom of the hill there was a full-blown carnival going. The oompah band was playing. Ten crazed fans from Germany came with cuckoo clocks glued to the front of their hard hats. A rowdy crowd of 35,000 howled in awe as each ski jumper burst into view and floated back to earth, his skis touching down with a slap.


At the top of the mountain Tuesday, though, silence prevailed. Most ski jumpers say an unconflicted mind-set matters more than anything.


And the Japanese were sailing down the hill in the four-man Olympic team ski-jump competition with such calm and surety that they had built a forbidding lead heading into the second and final round, and had second-place Germany thinking not even a magnificent jump from its ace, Jens Weissflog, would be enough to win.


But Weissflog did not settle for just trying to pull off a magnificent jump. Weissflog might have reverted to a sly little mind game too. "Congratulations on the gold medal," he said to Masahiko Harada as Harada prepared to make Japan's last but still-crucial jump of the competition. Harada, recoiling at the idea of celebrating prematurely, said, "No, no, we must wait."


Then, with thoughts of the glory waiting for him if he could just make it to the bottom of the hill with a respectable effort, Harada went out, spit off the lip of the ski jump and fell to earth like a man with a piano on his back.


Weissflog -- one of the old men on the hill at 28 -- jumped three slots later and nailed the gold for Germany by soaring 135.5 meters -- the best jump of the day.


Just like that, the top Olympic finish that Japan has been chasing since the 1972 Games in Sapporo had slipped away again.


"Maybe," Harada whispered, "I felt the fear. Maybe I was too conservative. Maybe I thought too much about the gold medal before I jumped."


Harada flew only 97.5 meters on his final jump, 24 meters shorter than his first effort and the worst among anyone on the top eight teams.


Even Roar Ljokelsoy, 17 -- a Norwegian high schooler whose official Olympic biography lists his favorite drink as a milkshake -- managed 99.5 meters on his final jump. Though that effort allowed Austria to pass Norway for the bronze medal and silenced the crowd at Lillehammer's Lysgardsbakkene ski-jumping stadium, Ljokelsoy's flop paled next to Harada's fold.


And Harada knew it.


The 26-year-old Japanese, now competing in his second Olympics, dropped to his knees in anguish, his fists clenched and head still hung down in shame even after he'd been yanked to his feet by his three teammates and reminded they still had the silver medal won. Soon enough Harada's teammates had gotten him to break into a smile.


"He's always smiling," said Norwegian star Espen Bredesen, the man who overheard Tuesday's top-of-the-hill exchange between Weissflog and Harada, "But there was something behind the mask today. I could tell he was disappointed.


"I don't know if it (Weissflog's comment) set him off, but you should wait until a guy is finished. I thought he would pull it off anyway, you know, but you can't congratulate a guy before he has jumped. You shouldn't make comments about that."


The uncertainty Weissflog's comment seemed to trigger in Harada underscored the never-ebbing mystery of the event.


"The only thing I can compare it too is a golf swing," says U.S. jumper Jim Holland, who will compete on the 90-meter event later this week. "So many things go into it and so many things go wrong. Even when you watch a videotape you can't tell for sure why some guys stop where they do and some guys go 30 meters farther down the hill."


But to get a true sense of the wonder of what the jumpers do, the best place to watch them isn't at the landing area at the bottom of the hill, or even the terraced stands that climb halfway up the venue here. It's on the slow chair-lift ride that travels up and down the mountain throughout the competition.


About halfway up, the mountain levels off momentarily near the lip of the jumping ramp, creating a ledge that makes the landing area and grandstands below vanish completely. If you look backward over your shoulder right then, the feeling is quite literally like being at the end of the earth, and the jumpers seem to shoot off into a blue abyss, growing smaller as they quickly flew away into Tuesday's perfect blue cloudless sky, their bodies leaning so far forward that their chins appear about to touch their upturned ski tips.


The jumpers don't speak much about those heart-in-the-throat moments when they are picking up speed as they shoot down the ramp, or the joy after they have successfully landed. What seems to transfix them all is the obvious: those moments when they are airborne and just soaring.


The sensation, they all say, is like riding the wind.


"The air gets under your chest and just holds you up like a hand," says Ljokelsoy.


"It's flying," Bredesen smiles.


"Even when you are riding a wave of success," Weissflog adds, "it's hard to explain why."