Olympic bronze medalist and ski jumping world champion Alexandria Loutitt gave a talk at the Kimberley Nordic Club on Saturday, Apr. 29.
Born in Calgary, Alta., Loutitt, 19, is the 2023 world champion and junior world champion and in all of ski jumping is the first female athlete to do that in one season, and the second athlete in ski jumping to ever accomplish that.
She was visiting Kimberley as she has four grandparents who live here.
She said the first time she watched the Olympics on television was in 2010 and she “fell in love with the crazy skiing sports.”
“At the time I didn’t realize that ski jumping wasn’t an Olympic sport for girls,” Loutitt said. “My obsession with skiing began.”
Loutitt started ski jumping in 2013, shortly before her tenth birthday, and she said that, “in all honesty no one thought it was going to last.”
“And here we are ten years later and I’m still doing it,” she said.
In 2018 the ski jump facility at Calgary’s Canada Olympic Park closed due to lack of funding, she explained, so Loutitt moved to Germany in 2019 on her 15th birthday and has been living in Europe since then, currently in Slovenia skiing for the Canadian National Team.
She began competing on the world stage in 2020, but then unfortunately the pandemic hit, so she missed out on many early events in her career.
In 2022 she was named to the Olympic team and competed in the Women’s Individual. Here she was disqualified for being 300 grams too light — that’s equivalent to the weight of a bag of chips.
Fortunately, she had brought a second pair of skis and was able to compete on the mixed team and came away with a bronze medal.
In her presentation Loutitt showed her Olympic announcement video and highlighted her history and progression through the remarkable sport of ski jumping.
Loutitt said that she is very proud to represent Canada and the Gwich’in First Nation on the world stage, the latter of which she has a connection to on her father’s side of the family. She said she wants to be a positive role model for both Indigenous people and women in sport.
She said getting to travel all over the world to train and compete is one of the greatest things about sports, the “adventures you find yourself in.”
Loutitt’s mantra, or motivational saying is “Why not me?” which she originally heard from another athlete through a CanFund meeting, an organization that provides grant funding to young and up-and-coming athletes in Canada.
It was at this meeting where she received her first funding from CanFund and she heard the saying and fell in love with it, writing it on her hand and using it as her mantra going forward.
“I thought to myself, why not me, why can’t I win, why can’t I do this?” she said. “It’s my reminder to myself that I’m my only limitation. I put in the work, so I can do what I want to achieve, my brain’s the only thing stopping me at this point.”
Her most recent “why not me” moment was when she set the world record, flying 225 metres through the air at the first ever ski flying jumps for women in Vikersund, Norway.
She is one of either five or six women ever to fly over 200 metres and is the current Canadian record holder.
“Canada is now the only nation where a woman holds the national record,” she said. “So it’s pretty cool that Canada is the only nation where the girls jump farther than the guys.”
Looking ahead, Loutitt has a lot of big goals. In the next five years she hopes to win several Crystal Globes, the “ultimate prize”, for a variety of winter sport disciplines, and ultimately an Olympic gold medal.