The image of ski jumping burned into the brains of generations of Americans is actually the image of a man not ski jumping. In 1970, during a competition in Germany, an ill-prepared Slovenian named Vinko Bogataj shot down the hill in a crouch, but tipped backward a few yards from the end. From there, the blundering escalated quickly. Bogataj slid briefly on his rear, then began whipping around ferociously, his long skis twirling like a propeller. As he spun off the hill into the crowd, his goggles shot off, like a shard of food ejected from a malfunctioning blender, and his body ripped down a promotional banner hanging in his way. Finally, after much bouncing, he came to a stop. The old rule held: What goes up must come down, even though he never really went up.

Bogataj’s ski-jumping career ended. But the footage of his crash was incorporated into the opening sequence of ABC’s “Wide World of Sports” — illustrating what the stentorian voice-over called “the agony of defeat.” Rebroadcast every weekend for almost three decades, the disaster became iconic — viral, in a regularly scheduled, pre-internet way. Until the network tracked him down 11 years later, Bogataj had no idea he’d become the face of failure in America — or, for that matter, the de facto face of ski jumping, an otherwise exceedingly low-profile sport. Eventually, another figure would lodge in the American imagination, a ski-jumping catastrophist of a different type: Eddie the Eagle, a.k.a. Michael Edwards, the hapless English plasterer who had been training for exactly 20 months when he represented the United Kingdom at the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary. Eddie arrived with no coach and competed with borrowed equipment and so much staggering fear, he explained to the press, that just before letting go of the bar at the top of the in-run, he could feel his “bum shriveled up like a prune.” He finished last, of course, but charmed planet Earth with his buffoonish gutsiness. He still does public appearances. A biopic came out in 2016.

In many European countries, ski jumping is as prominent as basketball is here. But for a long time in the United States, the only ski jumpers familiar to many people were a court jester from England and that flopping, man-shaped ceiling fan who spun downhill on TV every Saturday afternoon. These are the reference points outsiders tend to throw back at anyone who gushes that after years of admirable persistence, her son or daughter is going to the Olympics in ski jumping. Never mind that lately a surge of talent, optimism and pride has been building within the sport. Such is the half-life of sensational failures.

America has won a medal in ski jumping at the Olympics exactly once, during the first modern Games, in 1924, when an eccentric part-time bricklayer named Anders Haugen earned a bronze. And even then, because of a scoring error, Haugen’s medal was accidentally given to a Norwegian jumper. The mistake was caught 50 years later; Haugen received his medal at age 86.

In those early days, the sport looked nothing as it does now. Jumpers soared into the air in a prouder, more upright position, arms stretched forward, like superheroes. In retrospect, the posture may have reflected a philosophical misunderstanding: Ski jumpers still saw themselves as protagonists, conquering the wind instead of riding it.

“It’s really unnatural and uncomfortable — the whole sport, generally,” says Alan Alborn, a former Olympian and the current U.S. women’s ski-jumping head coach. For young jumpers especially, training on smaller hills, the experience is almost violent. An athlete’s body is overloaded with sensation: a barrage of air pressure; the whistling static and rush of the wind. But slowly, his or her mechanics improve. The takeoffs get cleaner: The legs push down harder, lifting the jumper off the end of the in-run more explosively and with better timing. Then the skis find just the right angle at which to splay. The hill at the Olympics is steep enough and long enough to enable jumps of 100 meters. But by the time a kid moves up to jumping from the so-called 60-meter hill, usually when she’s around 13, she is picking up sufficient speed on the runway to feel it happen in the air — that thing she has been hearing about for years.

What is it, exactly? The short answer is: flight. The jumper has harnessed the air beneath her skis and is genuinely, momentarily flying. But the way the phenomenon is discussed, it’s almost as though the athlete has entered some unconveyable altered state. A former Olympic coach, Scott Smith, told me flatly: “It’s hard to explain to you, because you don’t do it.” Alborn compared the experience to that trope in action films where, suddenly, all the frenetic, bullet-whirring madness jerks into ultraslow motion. The onrush of sensation is gone. From there, it all gets very simple. Alborn says, “You want to stay away from the earth as long as possible.”

That is, once in the air, the art of ski jumping lies in minimizing the fact that you exist — that you are solid mass, subject to gravity. Accordingly, the aerodynamics of the jumpsuit jumpers wear have gradually been tweaked. The get-ups, which resemble a kind of human beer cozy, now sag in the crotch, to subtly catch more of an updraft, and are permeable, to minimize unhelpful resistance. There are, however, scrupulous rules about the degree of sagging and permeability; the threat of “suit doping” is real.

Otherwise, it’s a matter of shimmying your shoulder or hip here or there, optimizing your body geometry in real time, to compensate for microgusts of wind. Mostly, you just lie forward, at an impossible angle, then more forward still, flattening yourself into a sleek, nearly two-dimensional shape. Physicists have worked up mathematical equations to describe all this, but here’s the gist: After you barrel down a tremendous hill and propel yourself off the bottom with all the brute force your legs and psyche can muster, the goal is to shrug off these acts of preternatural courage and audacity and suddenly become nothingness. You may think you’re still the pilot, but you’re not. You’re the wing.

Then, of course: whack. After flying the length of a football field at 55 miles an hour, even the most graceful landing carries a significant shock. Historically, the harshness of that impact, and the threat of accidents, have led men to prohibit women from participating in the sport. A journalist covering a competition in 1910 noted that the Austrian noblewoman Paula Lamberg — an early renegade, known as the Floating Baroness — executed some excellent jumps, “even for men.” Though, he added, “one prefers to see women with nicely mellifluous movements which show elegance and grace, like in ice skating or lawn tennis.” And it definitely wouldn’t be “enjoyable or aesthetic” to watch a woman crash, he went on, particularly the unsavory sight of her “mussed-up hair.”

Other turn-of-the-century objections were pseudoscientific, often focused on the uterus. Amazingly, these lasted through the turn of our century. By 2005, men had been ski jumping in the Olympics for 81 years, but the International Olympic Committee still refused to sanction a women’s event. That year, the president of the International Ski Federation explained to NPR that the sport “seems not to be appropriate for ladies from a medical point of view” — to which the American ski jumper Lindsey Van artfully responded, “I kind of want to vomit.” Van found herself burdened with explaining that for her, unlike for all those ski-jumping men, “my baby-making organs are on the inside.”

Ultimately women’s ski jumping was admitted to the 2014 Games in Sochi, not long after a lawsuit filed against the organizers of the preceding Games, in Vancouver, by 15 of the most accomplished female jumpers in the world, including Van. (At the time, Van held the record for jumpers of any gender on the Vancouver Olympic hill.) The tenacious battle for inclusion shone a brighter light on the sport. There was a daily swirl of reporters around the women as they trained. For decades, the most familiar stories in ski jumping were about the spectacular or laughable failures of men who maybe shouldn’t have been competing in the first place. For the women, the entire story was about the fight to take off.

By now, the best American jumper and emerging face of the sport is widely acknowledged to be Sarah Hendrickson, a 23-year-old from Park City, Utah. After rebounding from a catastrophic knee injury four years ago, Hendrickson now has a not-inconceivable shot at winning a medal in Pyeongchang and has sponsorships from Red Bull and Nike. Both are unusual circumstances for an American ski jumper. Nearly a million people watched her and the other Americans compete in this year’s Olympic ski-jumping trials on NBC in December. It was the second-most-watched event of all the Olympic trials the network broadcast. And it was a Sunday to boot; there was football happening.

Three of those viewers were sitting on my couch. The first time Hendrickson jumped — a floating, otherworldly wisp, zipped in a neon-green, microfiber flight suit — she hung in the center of the screen long enough for my 4-year-old daughter to ask if she was real.