Nathalie Armbruster, Daniela Dejori and Annika Malacinski found out they would not be making the 2026 Winter Olympics in June of 2022. It wasn’t a poor performance at the ski jump or a slow cross-country ski race. It wasn’t an injury. They didn’t fall just short at Olympic trials. The women didn’t even get to try. That’s because they compete in Nordic combined, a sport that incorporates both cross-country skiing and ski jumping, and has been a part of the Winter Olympics since the first-ever Gam
It wasn’t a poor performance at the ski jump or a slow cross-country ski race. It wasn’t an injury. They didn’t fall just short at Olympic trials.
The women didn’t even get to try.
That’s because they compete in Nordic combined, a sport that incorporates both cross-country skiing and ski jumping, and has been a part of the Winter Olympics since the first-ever Games in 1924.
Women have never competed in Nordic combined at the Olympics. The IOC is touting the 2026 Games as “the most gender-balanced Olympic Winter Games in history,” with women making up 47 percent of athletes. Twelve of the 16 disciplines include full gender parity. But one discipline lacks a women’s event altogether: Nordic combined.
While women started competing in cross-country skiing at the Olympics in 1952 and ski jumping in 2014, women’s Nordic combined didn’t host its first World Cup season until 2020-21. Athletes hoped they had shown a deep enough field and strong enough growth for the IOC to include the event in the 2026 Games.
So in 2022, the women of Nordic combined tuned in across the world to a YouTube stream, where the IOC handed down its decision: No women’s Nordic combined in 2026.
“My world was crashing down on this day,” said Armbruster, 20, who competes for Germany.
In fact, the IOC put the entire sport on notice, including the men: grow the number of people, the diversity of countries competing and the size of the audience, or risk falling off the Olympic program altogether.
“I remember I was sitting at my friend’s house … I had my phone, and I threw it on the floor,” said Dejori, 23, who grew up in Val Gardena, Italy, less than 40 miles from where the men will compete at the Olympics. “I was ready to quit. Because I was so shocked.”
Malacinski, who competes for the U.S. and has spent years advocating for women’s Nordic combined, learned the news while on a flight. She cried in the airplane bathroom.
“Everything that I had sacrificed — after school, I could have gone to college and I could’ve gone to pursue an education or pursue my dreams of traveling the world, but I put everything on hold to pour everything that I had into this sport,” Malacinski, 24, recalled. “My idea was, I’m just going to quit. I’m going to switch to ski jumping. There was no future in my head for Nordic combined anymore.”
Four years later, the women of Nordic combined are stuck sitting on the sidelines while their male counterparts compete — and relying on the men’s performance to keep the sport’s future in the Games alive. As the Olympic men’s competition kicks off on Wednesday, it’s not just medals that are at stake. It’s the future of one of the Winter Olympics’ original sports.
After the 2022 decision, Dejori didn’t quit, and neither did Malacinski or Armbruster. Neither did the other women obsessed not just with the lung-searing, leg-burning intensity of a cross-country ski race, but also with the gravity-defying, jaw-dropping sensation of flying.
People ask them why they don’t just choose one or the other — ski jumping or cross-country skiing — both of which have a more secure status on the Olympic stage.
But athletes like Armbruster love the duality.
“Being great in both sports is so difficult,” she said. “In Germany, we call Nordic combined the discipline of the kings and queens.”
All events have concluded. See full medal count.
Last season, Armbruster won the overall World Cup title, a performance that included eight podium appearances with three first-place finishes.
“Now I know that this could have been my Olympic Games,” Armbruster said.
At a clothing event for German athletes in 2025, an interviewer asked Armbruster what she planned to pack in her bag for the Olympics.
“In the past years I was successful in not thinking about it too much, but this year, it’s different. Everyone is talking about the Olympics,” Armbruster said in December. “I cried a lot of tears in the past month.”
Dejori is at the Games this month in a volunteer uniform, testing the ski jump ahead of the competitors.
“You see all the other athletes having their new Olympic helmet, their new Olympic suit, everything new … I’m here too, I’m jumping on the same hill, and I have that dream too,” Dejori said. “It’s just sad.”
Then there’s the financial piece. Top-level athletes like Armbruster have plenty of sponsors, but still miss out on opportunities without the promise of the Olympics.
“I think that we would definitely get more opportunities in sponsorship if we (were) an Olympic discipline. Definitely. There have been some (potential sponsors) who talked to me and said, ‘Ah well, but you’re not an athlete of an Olympic discipline,’” Armbruster said. “It definitely makes a difference.”
Both Armbruster and Dejori are fully supported by their national federations, which are supported by the German and Italian governments, just like their male counterparts. But in America, the federal government doesn’t fund national federations, and in 2024, USA Nordic Sport stopped financially supporting Nordic combined for both men and women, citing financial challenges.
That year, a group of parents launched Nordic Combined USA, a nonprofit trying to save a sport that saw the U.S. men win four Olympic medals — one gold and three silver — as recently as 2010.
Jill Brabec, president of Nordic Combined USA, said that the organization needs to raise $500,000 each year to support the team. Her daughter, Alexa, has notched seven podiums so far this season, including one first-place finish, and currently sits second overall in the World Cup standings.
“In my mind, there’s no other option,” Jill Brabec said of fundraising, much of which comes from private donations.
Athletes end up paying tens of thousands of dollars out of pocket, too. The costs add up: coaches, hotels, international flights for training camps and competitions. This year, thanks to a $100 million donation to the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Foundation, every U.S. Olympian and Paralympian who qualifies for the Games will receive a $200,000 grant — money unavailable to athletes like Brabec and Malacinski, who can’t compete at the Olympics.
Malacinski said she tries to budget about $50,000 for out-of-pocket costs each year.
“That’s partly donors, individual sponsors that I have, my savings, working as much as I can while I’m home,” said Malacinski, who is from Steamboat Springs, Colo., and works at a hot spring and babysits during the offseason. “It makes you wonder how good you could be if you had the resources that others did.”
This month, Malacinski’s brother, Niklas, will be competing at the Olympics in Nordic combined.
“It’s extremely frustrating because I do exactly what he does,” Malacinski said. “I ski the same courses. I ski jump the same ski jumps.”
Although they can’t compete, the future of the women’s event depends on the performance of the men.
“The future inclusion of Nordic combined depends on significant positive developments, particularly with regard to participation and audience,” the IOC said in a statement, pointing to the fact that at the last three Winter Games, athletes from just four countries — Norway, Germany, Japan and Austria — won all the medals in the three Olympic Nordic combined events. The IOC wants to diversify the countries that compete in the Winter Olympics, and is considering adding non-snow sports, like cross-country running, to do so.
The sport has struggled to draw an audience, too.
“Nordic combined had by far the lowest audience numbers of any discipline of the programme over the last three Games cycles,” the IOC said.
In 2022, the IOC pointed to the first-ever women’s Nordic combined competition at the Nordic World Ski Championships in 2021, where women from just 10 nations competed and where Norway took gold, silver and bronze. But the overall World Cup win in that first 2020-21 season went to Tara Geraghty-Moats of the U.S., followed by athletes from Norway and Japan. In five years of World Cup competition, athletes from Germany, Italy, Austria, Slovenia and Finland have also joined the podium.
Advocates for Nordic combined say that the scrutiny over the diversity of countries in the sport is a double standard, because European countries dominate many of the snow sports at the Winter Olympics.
Bill Demong, who won gold for the U.S. in 2010 and was the executive director of USA Nordic Sport for seven years after his retirement, called the IOC’s figures “trash numbers.” He pointed to the fact that the past few games were held in countries where Nordic sports do not have a large presence, like South Korea and China, middle-of-the-night broadcast times in the U.S., and more countries on the podium pre-2014.
“To me it’s an epic fail on (the IOC’s) part,” Demong said. “If they wanted to be gender equitable, they would have at least added women’s for this (Games).”
Nordic combined faces other headwinds. Youth development in the sport relies on access to both a ski jump and cross-country skiing trails, something not available in most of the world. For the women, building a pipeline is challenging without the possibility of the Olympics.
“I don’t think that we can progress as a sport without the Olympics,” Malacinski said.
Sandra Spitz, Sport & Event Director for the International Ski and Snowboard Federation, said that in the past few years, FIS has invested 250,000 Swiss francs annually in the development and growth of Nordic combined.
“We felt we have done all the steps, we have seen the growth, we have fulfilled the markers which IOC gave us,” Spitz said.
When asked about the importance of this year’s Games to the future of the sport, Spitz’s answer was clear: “I think it’s decisive.”
The IOC said Nordic combined will “undergo a full evaluation” based on data collected during the Milan Cortina Games, which will inform whether it will include the sport in the 2030 Winter Olympics in France.
That means the men competing at the Milan Cortina Games have more than just their country’s medal chances on their shoulders.
Niklas Malacinski knows the stakes. Growing up, he tried a lot of sports, but decided to commit to Nordic combined when the 2010 U.S. team won gold. Making his Olympic debut, Niklas dreams of winning his own and inspiring the next generation.
“There definitely has been added pressure with potentially the last Olympics,” he said. “I think the women are going to get their chance, as long as the men are able to show good numbers. So I just encourage everybody to turn on Nordic combined. Take a look at how cool of a sport it is, and definitely don’t judge us for the state of the IOC and their decisions.”
As for the women, while they won’t be at the Olympics, they still have the rest of the World Cup racing season ahead. The athletes staged a protest at the last World Cup before the Olympics in Seefeld, Austria, at the end of January, holding up their poles in the shape of an X at the starting line, representing “no exceptions” for women’s exclusion from the Games.
There’s solidarity among this group left out of Milan Cortina, but competition is still fierce.
“I’m working my ass off like every man in the sport or like every other athlete in an Olympic discipline,” said Armbruster, who has notched seven World Cup podiums so far this season as she looks to defend her title. She currently sits in fourth.
When asked if she could tell the IOC anything about women’s Nordic combined, Armbruster had two words:
“Watch us.”
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
Olympics, Olympics, Women's Olympics
2026 The Athletic Media Company
Category: General Sports
