'I thought maybe I would find out how it felt to fly."
Katie Willis, the 16-year-old athlete who has become the Jump Girl in the debate over whether female ski jumpers will be allowed to compete in the 2010 Winter Olympics, is on the phone from the family home in Calgary.
In between taking calls on another line and returning to the conversation with a sing-songy and polite apology for the interruption, she is describing her initial fascination with the sport that has dominated half of her young life.
"I was eight years old, and my mom signed me up for a camp in the summer, and they had a whole bunch of sports, biking and stuff, and ski jumping," she explains. "I didn't realize it was scary. It was so thrilling."
In the summer, jumpers ski down a track of wet ceramic tiles instead of snow, "and the landing is in this area with millions of plastic straws," she reports with a laugh.
By the end of the weeklong camp at Canada Olympic Park in Calgary, she felt committed to jumping. "Every other sport bored me," she says, listing off others she excelled at, including swimming, soccer and gymnastics. "This was something I could see myself continuing. I remember running to the car after the first time I tried it to tell my mom how exciting it was."
Her mother, Jan, who is a nurse, remembers coming to pick her up that day. "She was jumping up and down, and when she told me about ski jumping, my heart was going, 'What?' Initially, there was disbelief. ... I couldn't imagine it," she says on the phone in a later interview.
"But then there was relief in a way because she had found a sport she loved. Katie was a daredevil, jumping and climbing up things, from the time she was two years old. It's pretty scary seeing her go off the jumps, but I see the joy, too. And, you know, you just have to go with it as a
parent."
During her summer camp introduction to ski jumping, a coach immediately identified the young girl as having potential, and she soon got involved in year-round training. "Me and eight guys," the younger Ms. Willis says.
As she progressed in the sport, graduating to bigger jumps, she often felt scared, she acknowledges. A few years ago, she had a big crash, she adds matter-of-factly. "I broke my shoulder blade." Was that her first accident? "Oh no, I had little ones, like, I would get a little bit of a concussion."
Did injuries ever cause her to question if she should continue? "No way," she responds brightly. "I would be back on the hill, wanting to be better so it wouldn't happen again."
Currently in Grade 11, she entered Calgary's National Sport School last year. The high school, designed to accommodate the training and travel schedule of elite athletes, was founded in 1994 by the Calgary Olympic Development Association and the Calgary Board of Education.
"You learn how to prioritize," Ms. Willis explains of her education and sports training. "The teachers are flexible and there's a lot of
independent learning."
Asked if she's a good student, she doesn't hesitate to answer, "Oh, I think so. I was the smartest in my class in Grade 10." She received two scholarships to attend the school, one for athletic excellence and the other for academic achievement.
In the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy, 20 Canadian competitors were former or current students of the school.
Ms. Willis' current training schedule includes ski jumping in the morning - she rises at 5 a.m. to get to the facility by 6:45 - followed by school and, in the afternoon, training in a gym with weights.
