By Peter Minde
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Flying under the radar in the U.S., nordic combined is coming back. You’d best be prepared.
As Period 1 of the Nordic Combined World Cup ends, American Alexa Brabec is tearing it up. Second overall in the standings. Podium placements in consecutive race meets. Second overall in Ramsau; third overall the preceding weekend in Trondheim.
Brabec isn’t a flash in the pan. Her performance at the World Championships in Trondheim last spring, including fourth place in the mass start 5 km/normal hill race, adumbrated her individual success this season. On the team side, Brabec, Ben Loomis, and siblings Annika and Niklas Malacinski combined for a 9th-place finish in the mixed team normal hill / 4 x 5 km relay at world champs.
It’s been a long 12 years since USSS essentially kicked American nordic combined to the curb. People with grit and a passion for the sport have brought it back.
“No matter what, you need to be pretty intrinsically motivated. That’s a big part of the conversation of who’s sticking with nordic combined,” said Colin Delaney earlier this year. “It’s always been one of the less participated in, less acknowledged sports.”
On a dreary October morning, Delaney, the head coach for ski jumping and nordic combined at New York Ski Education Foundation, or NYSEF, made time to chat with Nordic Insights. In 2008, Delaney graduated from high school in Lake Placid. Subsequently, he competed in World Junior Championships. After graduating from college, he earned a handful of World Cup starts, mostly in 2015.
NoCo on the brink of elimination?
As Period 1 of the 2025/2026 season ends, nordic combined’s Olympic future is unclear. In 2016, FIS agreed to a women’s nordic combined World Cup. Tara Geraghty-Moats won the inaugural women’s NoCo World Cup, held in Ramsau in December 2020.
Now, the International Olympic Committee is considering whether to drop nordic combined from the roster altogether following the Milan–Cortina Winter Olympics in February 2026. The IOC has alleged a limited number of competitors, that the same countries always win (author: If that’s the reason, let’s also eliminate men’s nordic skiing and women’s slalom. But I digress.), and waning interest in the sport as reasons for the cut.
Simultaneously, female noco athletes are fighting for inclusion in the Olympics. In the aftermath of the Flaming Leaves Festival in Lake Placid earlier this year, Nordic Insights set out to explore the current state of the sport.
“The IOC decision regarding nordic combined is keeping me up at night,” wrote Jill Brabec. Based in Steamboat Springs, Brabec is the president of Nordic Combined USA (NCUSA). While USSS is the national governing body for American ski sport, NCUSA handles the day-to-day chores.
“In 2022 when [IOC] made the announcement regarding not including women’s nordic combined on the 2026 Olympic program, they pointed to lack of podium diversity, participating nations, and viewership numbers,” Brabec wrote.
“Yet, a deep dive into winter sports shows that quite a few sports have dominant nations — think luge (Germany) and short track speed skating (South Korea). And for nordic combined, that tide is turning with regard to the women in particular with the podium for World Championships last year seeing women from three different nations (Japan, Norway, Germany) and four if you include the U.S., just off the podium in fourth.”
Brabec flatly refuted the IOC’s viewership concern. “Women’s nordic combined saw a 25 percent viewership growth, according to the FIS Media report for 24-25,” she wrote. “The sport overall saw 14 percent growth.” She added that noco social media posts recently showed “off the charts growth.”
Although the individual Gundersen start remains the primary race format, FIS has introduced two additional race formats, the mass start and individual compact. You can learn about them here. The goal was to shake things up and make for tighter racing.
As for participation, eighteen nations sent athletes to compete in nordic combined in the 2022 Winter Olympics, with a total of 55 [male] athlete spots available. In Milan–Cortina in February, 17 nations will field only 36 athletes, again all male. While Google AI alleges that 22 nations have registered women’s nordic combined teams, only 14 nations have fielded women’s teams in the nordic combined World Cup.
Meanwhile, ski mountaineering, a/k/a skimo, will feature a total of only 36 athletes in its inaugural Olympic appearance in Milan–Cortina. Evenly divided between men and women.
Training
The challenge of nordic combined is its dichotomy: the explosive strength of jumping, the first extreme sport, followed by the intense aerobic grind of a 10km race. In her stunning short film, Where She Lands, national team skier Annika Malacinski explains, of the jumping phase, “You have less than a second to get everything right in one push.”
In a Lake Placid coffee shop overflowing with parents from a weekend hockey tournament, Delaney shared his thoughts.
“You’re training as a cross-country skier that ski jumps rather than the other way around,” Delaney said. That doesn’t mean one can be a mediocre jumper/good skier and get results. “You have to be a strong ski jumper to be able to compete internationally. You [also] have to be able to ski a strong 10km in order to be successful.” On the strength training component, Delaney noted, “You’ll do some heavy squats, but a lot more elastic work, plyometric training.”
The total training hours might be less than a cross-country athlete puts in: “Because we [men] only ski 10k races, I don’t think you need quite the same volume as a distance ski athlete, or even a biathlete,” Delaney reasoned.
Athletes don’t just log hours on rollerskis and trails. Sports psychology has long been part of an athlete’s toolbox. Malacinski takes it a step further, working with a hypnotist. It ain’t the tired trope of Wile E. Coyote waving a pocket watch in front of the Roadrunner’s face.
“I started working with hypnosis back in 2020,” Annika Malacinski wrote to Nordic Insights. “I did one session with [a hypnotist] and immediately felt the benefits — especially in terms of calmness, visualization, and overall confidence. She offered to continue working with me through winter, and that’s how it became part of my performance routine.
“For me, hypnosis is a tool in addition to sports psychology, not a replacement,” she added. “It’s a powerful form of guided meditation that’s helped me visualize World Cup weekends, manage anxiety around big competitions. One of the biggest breakthroughs was helping me overcome the fear I developed after jumping on icy snow following an injury. It’s been incredibly impactful.”
Growing the sport
“We’re happy, but we have a long way to go to make this sustainable.” Four-time nordic combined Olympian Taylor Fletcher (and one-time world champs medalist, from Val di Fiemme in 2013) took time out during a business trip to speak with Nordic Insights. He’s now a NCUSA board member. Fletcher was on the NoCo national team when USSS cut team funding in 2014. Overnight, their budget plummeted from $1 million to $40,000.
NCUSA currently runs on approximately $800,000 per year. That figure covers athlete transportation, equipment, ski service, coaching, and lodging, among other things. They’ve been looking for larger, corporate donors to augment the grass roots. But, as Olympic gold medalist Bill Demong told me in October, the sport exists in a “resource constrained environment.”
In the USA, it’s a tough model because of the preponderance of corporate donors. “We’ve focused on grassroots donations,” Fletcher said. “But it’s the bare minimum to support the team. While we’re happy where we are, we need another $200k each year.”
Are there enough juniors in the NoCo pipeline? “That starts with local clubs,” was Fletcher’s response. Fletcher came up in Steamboat Springs Winter Sports Club (SSWSC), with 100 other kids. “A couple of things are a challenge,” he said. “We don’t have the budget that we want to take these kids to competitions.”
“I definitely wish there were more, but I think there are new athletes coming in to express interest,” Delaney said. “I’d say there’s a similar number in nordic combined as in ski jumping.” That is, at clubs that can offer both cross-country skiing and jumping. Many clubs in the northeast offer some combination of nordic skiing, jumping, and alpine skiing. Delaney noted that some Midwest clubs only offer ski jumping.
“I think that we’re losing more nordic combined kids at younger ages just because there aren’t, going into U16, U20, there aren’t as many meaningful competitive events for them to participate in,” he said. Compared to the cornucopia of races across the northeast for junior cross-country skiers, NoCo competition opportunities appear sparse. “I don’t think it’s anybody’s fault. It’s just challenging,” Delaney said.
Fletcher, however, sees the NoCo competition landscape improving: “We can do a much better job of building domestic events,” he said. “I think we’re getting to the point where we have a consistent schedule.”
Getting more women involved
At Flaming Leaves, there was a marked disparity between the size of the men’s and women’s fields in the rollerski races. Responding to a query, Malacinski wrote, “Nordic combined is still such a niche sport in the United States, especially on the women’s side. We don’t have much visibility, and we have only about five to six [full-sized] ski jumps in the entire country, which makes access tough.
“For any young girl thinking about trying nordic combined,” Malacinski enthused, “I always say: go for it. It’s truly one of the coolest sports out there. You get to challenge yourself in two completely different disciplines, and the feeling of flying on the jump followed by pushing your limits in the cross-country race is unlike anything else. The sport needs more girls who are brave, curious, and excited to try something new — and I hope more of them take that chance.”
Each year, NCUSA sets aside money for development. And they’re looking for ways to build interest. “Anything we can do to build awareness around the sport,” Fletcher said.
In Where She Lands, Malacinski shares her passion, as well as the heartbreak when she learned that the IOC denied women’s nordic combined a seat the table.
It’s less than 10 minutes long, and is conveniently embedded above. Watch the dang film.
Of Where She Lands, Malacinski wrote, “My friend Søndre who does pole vaulting had filmed a short piece with GLIMPSE, and I commented on the video telling him how cool I thought it was. Shortly after that, GLIMPSE reached out to me and asked if I’d be open to meeting on Zoom — they were interested in possibly creating something together.
“They connected deeply with my story, and I felt the same with their vision and style. Before I knew it, they were on a flight to Trondheim, and we were starting this project together. It still amazes me how much they believed in me and wanted to help share my journey. The rest is history.
“As for difficulties, the biggest challenge was probably the emotional side — being vulnerable, opening up, and letting cameras into both my highs and the really personal lows of my career. But ultimately, that honesty is what made the film special.”
Cost to compete
There are differing views on the cost for juniors to compete. “It’s all relative,” Fletcher said. “Hockey, you have to get new equipment on a yearly basis, as kids grow. Travel, coaching. One of our challenges is, they need new equipment as they grow, and as they get good, they need more equipment. As they get better, they have to travel more, and that’s another expense.” Fletcher added that as a junior, his mother often had to finance ski expeditions with a credit card.
For top junior athletes, “I don’t think [the cost of competing] is any more or less of an impediment than it has been in the past,” Delaney said. “I think most clubs are trying to make ski jumping accessible compared to cross-country skiing. But other competitive winter sports, I think that cost is less of a hindrance to them.”
“Ultimately, there is more of a push to travel across the country at a younger age in jumping than there is in cross-country skiing strictly. So there is some additional cost in that.”
Equal representation. Equal distances?
While women are competing on the same jumping hills as the men, their cross-country race distances are shorter. On the World Cup, women ski a 5km race, compared to 10km for the men. When might we see equal distances? “Over time, we can talk about equal distance. I like what cross-country has done with equal distance,” Fletcher said. But he feels the priority is getting to the Olympic roster, and then pushing for equal distance.
While Brabec is second overall in the Nordic Combined World Cup standings, Malacinski is in 13th place, and Tara Geraghty-Moats sits in 28th. Two women in the NoCo top 20; three in the top 30. On the men’s side, Annika’s brother, Niklas Malacinski, is 32d, and Ben Loomis is 52d.
U.S. Nordic Combined is fighting its way outta the wilderness. What would this portend if women were allowed to compete at the highest level? The furthest thing from the truth would be to call it a fluke or overnight success.
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