From a pickup truck to Slovenia: How Canada's ski jumpers defied all odds to win Olympic bronze

When she was 10 years old, Alexandria Loutitt cut some Olympic rings out of paper, and stuck them to her bedroom door.

She had already been ski jumping for two years. But if she had it her way, she would have tried the sport even sooner, after being mesmerised watching it during the 2010 Vancouver Games.

"My parents wouldn't let me because they thought it was too dangerous," Loutiit told CBC Sports from Beijing, fresh off Canada's bronze medal in the mixed team event — the country's first ever Olympic ski jumping medal.

In 2011, the International Olympic Committee announced women's ski jumping would be on the Olympic program for the 2014 Sochi Games. So when Loutitt's brother was recruited at a WinSport summer camp in 2012 and got into the sport, her parents conceded and let her try it too.

It was a WinSport camp which also got teammate Abigail Strate recruited when she was six years old.

"We tried a bunch of different sports. Ski jumping was one of them. I went off like a little tiny jump on alpine skis and the people that were recruiting for the sport at the time went up to my mom and they said, 'Abby, Abby, she can go to the Olympics in the sport.' And my mom kind of laughed and was like, 'Haha, yeah,'" Strate recalled.

"I just found this out a few weeks ago, she told me they just handed her a two-week free camp thing and she was like 'OK, yup. I'm sold. She can try it' 

"Obviously, I never left. I was hooked."

But as the remaining ski jumping facilities in Calgary shut down in 2018 — the expense of maintaining them being one of the driving forces — so did the opportunities for young jumpers to get into the sport.

"We need a home," said Todd Stretch, the chairman (and jack-of-all-trades) of Ski Jumping Canada, adding