To ski jump is to momentarily become a god. The track is narrow and slick, and the athletes plummet down the sloped hill at almost 60 mph. They leave the track and take up, up, up into the sky, where they bend themselves forward. Their chests are almost at their skis, which they hold perfectly still, angled outward as they soar through the dark skies of Cortina like a bird of prey. They are so still, so serene as they glide through the air toward the bright green line of success. It is astonishing and mesmerizing to watch them.
But just imagine how much more beauty, splendor, and excitement men’s Olympic ski jumping could have if all of the men had bigger dicks.
In January, Kristina Ellwanger wrote in the German newspaper Bild that a new scandal was rocking the world of ski jumping: ein Penis-Gate. Because ski jumping is often determined by the thinnest of margins, athletes, she wrote, had found a new way to give themselves an advantage. They are allegedly pumping up their dicks with hyaluronic acid fillers.
To be clear, no individual Olympic ski jumpers have been accused of doing this. Penis-Gate is vague and speculative. But it sure seems like athletes would have a good reason to do this.
The doctor Bild spoke with explained that ski jumpers have always found ways to add a little extra substance to their genitals before suit fittings. The extra fabric functions as a kind of crotch sail, floating the athlete forward. Every extra centimeter of fabric is another centimeter that can buoy them through the air a few more feet. The scientific journal Frontier found that every extra 2 cm of suit translated to 5.8 more meters in the jump. The suit fittings are such an advantage that in January, two Norwegian ski-jumping coaches were suspended for 18 months after inserting illegal non-elastic stitching into the crotches of their best athletes. Stitches alone can give you an advantage! Imagine the advantage an athlete could gain if they simply had a bigger dick.
In the past, Bild explained, athletes could have simply stuffed their underwear when their suits were being hand-measured. But they have been thwarted by technology. The suits are now measured using 3D scanners, and Bild quoted Dr. Kamran Karim, a senior consultant at Maria-Hilf Hospital in Krefeld, saying that that he could rule out any attempts to enlarge the genitals using visual aids. No more stuffing your underwear with a sock, a condom full of water, or anything else. No! If you want to enlarge your genitals for a little extra air, you have to … literally enlarge your genitals.
The options for getting a bigger dick for the measurement of the suit, but not for the jump itself, are pretty limited. You could get an erection, sure. That’s one option. My instinct was that you could use a penis pump, but according to the Mayo Clinic, “Many ads in magazines and on the internet claim penis pumps can be used to increase penis size. But there’s no proof that they work for that.” So it makes sense to me that the athletes may have decided to inject filler into their dicks in order to make them bigger.
Hyaluronic acid fillers (brands like Juvéderm, Restylane) are some of the most popular dermal filler being used right now. They are FDA-approved, usually infused with lidocaine to reduce discomfort, and theoretically temporary. The effects usually last 6-12 months after injection, or you can get them dissolved by having another injection of hyaluronidase. This is the same kind of filler people are getting in their lips, cheeks, chins and hands, except this is different because it is going into dicks.
I had a lot of questions about this, so I decided to text an expert: my friend Jolie De Feis, who is an esthetician and author of the newsletter Hotline Skin.
“When you inject filler in the face, you can see some immediate results, but you’re swollen and it can take a few days to settle,” De Feis told me. “Since you aren’t doing it for aesthetics, then maybe it doesn’t matter for dicks. But I imagine if you do it too soon before an event, it would be swollen and uncomfortable.”
This seems fine to me if you are only injecting your penis with filler to make it as big as possible, so that when you get your 3D body scan for your special ski-jumping suit, you are given a little bit more fabric that can then make you sail through the sky like a beautiful bird. But I had more questions. Most importantly: How much filler is being put into the penises, and how big are they getting? Luckily, this information exists!
A systematic review of non-surgical methods for penile augmentation found that of the 205 patients who used hyaluronic acid fillers, the mean volume injected was 20-40 mL. As a comparison, if you wanted to get lip filler, you would probably be given 1-2 mL of filler. For facial sculpting, which is how everyone seems to have the same face now, that’s 4-8 mL of filler. People out there in the world, most if not all of them normal people who are not competing in the Olympics, are getting 20-40 mL of hyaluronic acid filler injected into their dicks.
I could not really conceptualize how much 20mL of fluid would be, so I asked my friend Sophia, who is a real doctor. She sent me this picture of a 20mL syringe, to share with all of you who are visual learners.
And remember: People are getting 40 mL. So two of these. Dr. Sophia says that it is most likely that they are getting four 10mL injections, but that is still a lot of filler going into the dicks to make them bigger!
And, according to another study I found, they do it like this: “Restylane Sub-Q (Q-med, Upssala, Sweden) was injected into the fascial layer of penile body via 21G cannula with ‘Back & Forth Technique’ and homogenized with a roller.” I did not know what this meant, obviously. But Dr. Sophia did. She said that they are probably injecting the filler just under the skin (subcutaneous) and then flattening it out manually so that it spreads around. She then sent a video of herself injecting a rolled-up mask that was supposed to represent the penis. I have to admit that this gave me a lot of respect for the people getting penis filler, because the “back & forth technique” mentioned means that the needle (not small!) has to go in and out in a kind of sexual pumping method. It took about 10 seconds for her to inject 3 mL of air into the mask/dick, so I imagine getting 40 mL of actual hyaluronic acid injected into your actual penis takes a while.
The many studies I found said that the hyaluronic acid fillers will not help at all with erectile function, so there is no medical use for it. But it does work! The systematic review of penis augmentation I mentioned earlier found that it could effectively increase penile girth. Multiple randomized controlled trials showed “significant and sustained increases ranging from 1.6 to 3.4 cm in flaccid girth and 0.8 to 1.3 cm in erect girth.” If we combine this knowledge with our knowledge of the suits, that means that you could gain many meters of ski jumping by injecting your penis with hyaluronic acid!
This is technically not illegal. Doping is illegal, but as of right now, increasing the size of your penis is not. However, the World Anti-Doping Agency does have the ability to ban substances that go against “the spirit of the sport.” Oliver Niggli, director general of the World Anti-Doping Agency, told The Athletic this weekend that “we don’t do other means of enhancing performance but our list committee would certainly look into whether this would fall into this category.”
I would argue that this should remain allowed. An athlete is permitted to get really big quads if they want! An athlete is allowed to eat a really big lunch, or not eat at all to modify their weight. It should be legal to do this, not just because it’s funny, but because the line between this kind of medical intervention and those that repair ligaments and numb muscles seems way too razor-thin to legislate.
Every Olympian’s story is one of perseverance and manipulation. They dunk their bodies into ice, ski down a mountain with a completely obliterated ACL, and fight against every instinct to launch themselves off giant ramps. It’s the pursuit of gold, after all—the goal they’ve spent their whole lives chasing. The margins between nothing and glory are tenths, sometimes hundredths, of a second. So if you were given the opportunity for an advantage, a way to push yourself just a little bit further past your opponent, you’d take it, right? I bet you would. You, too, would get a bunch of filler in your dick.