What to know about Nordic combined and its Olympic future

Nordic combined, the only Olympic sport that bars women from competition, dates to the original Winter Games but may not survive beyond the Milan Cortina competition.

The sport that fuses ski jumping with cross-country skiing is in jeopardy because it doesn’t have a big following and a small number of countries dominate the podium.

If the sport is scrapped, it would be a blow not just to the male athletes, but to the many women who compete internationally who have pushed for inclusion.

The International Olympic Committee was due to decide last year if the sport would be included in the 2030 French Alps Games but it has now deferred that decision until the spring.

How it works

Combine the daredevil thrill of ski jumping with a physically exhausting cross-country ski race and you get a two-day event unlike any other that was conceived in Norway in the late 1800s to determine the best all-around skier.

The athlete who leads after the ski jumping contest starts the cross-country race in the front of the pack. His head start is calculated by converting ski jumping points into seconds. The rest of the pack starts in their order of finish based on the same time handicap. Then it’s a 10-kilometer race to the finish line for gold.

The team event includes four teammates who jump and then join forces in a cross-country ski relay race.

Who to watch

Following the retirements of Norwegian stars Jarl Magnus Riiber, the sport’s most dominant competitor, and Jørgen Graabak, the most successful Olympic Nordic combined skier of all time, the field is wide open. Early season standouts in the 2025-2026 World Cup are Austria’s Johannes Lamparter and Germany’s Julian Schmid.

Venues and dates

The Nordic combined competition runs from Feb. 11-19. The contests are held in two locations: the Predazzo Ski Jumping Stadium and the Tesero Cross-Country Skiing Stadium. Both are in the Val di Fiemme area of the Dolomite mountains.

Memorable moments

Norway and Finland dominated the Olympics until 1960 when Georg Thoma of West Germany won the gold medal in the individual competition in Squaw Valley.

The U.S. first made it to podium in 2010 in Vancouver when Johnny Spillane won the silver medal on the normal hill. His teammate, Bill Demong, won the gold on the large hill, where Spillane finished second. The two also shared the silver medal in the team event.

In Beijing four years ago, Riiber was in first place after the jumping round and got a 44-second head start in the cross-country ski race, but took a wrong turn a quarter of the way, costing him a medal. Graabak won gold and Riiber finished eighth.

Fun facts

In the early days of the sport, the competition began with the cross-country ski race, but the order was reversed because the time advantages were often too large for jumpers to overcome.

Scoring was changed in 1988 to convert points from jumping into time handicaps in the cross-country race. Rather than taking hours to compute the outcome of the two events, it transformed the final event into an exciting race with a clear winner.

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AP Olympics coverage: https://apnews.com/hub/milan-cortina-2026-winter-olympics