The Last Bastion

At The Bygone Bureau Josh Fischel has a great feature on the only high school ski jumping league. This story is particularly close to my heart because I competed in this league back when I was on my high school ski team. My high school has one of the jumps from the 1932 Lake Placid Olympics and we often hosted the state meet, though insurance issues have kept NHS from fielding a ski jumping team for quite some time. As for my own ski jumping career? I was decent enough for a guy picking up the sport as a teenager. A guy a few years ahead of me was a multiple-time Olympic ski jumper and by the time he was in his early teens he could no longer use our jump because he would have out-jumped the incline and thus killed himself. Oh -- and there were only two "agony of defeat moments" that I saw. One came when a friend and teammate wiped out on the ramp in Plymouth, which was humiliating for him and so hilarious to us. The other one came when a jumper from Concord High crossed his tips in the air and we all thought we'd just seen someone die. he walked away with a concussion and broken nose.