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By Peter Minde
Is this a breakout season for U.S. nordic combined? It wasn’t not a breakout season.
Alexa Brabec notched her first career podium in December, then jumped and skied consistently for the rest of the year to finish second in the nordic combined World Cup overall standings. The American women placed three athletes in the top-15 overall to claim their place at the World Cup table; after Brabec in second, Tara Geraghty-Moats was ninth overall and Annika Malacinski twelfth. As a country, the American women ranked third in the Nations Cup standings for 2025/2026, behind only perennial powers Norway and Germany.
On the men’s side, Niklas Malacinski led four Americans in the overall standings in 23rd. Behind him, Ben Loomis placed 37th in the overall, Erik Lynch 59th, and Henry Johnstone 61st. The men ranked ninth in the Nations Cup.
In December 2025, Brabec scored her first career World Cup podium, taking third place in Trondheim in the Gundersen normal hill/5 km skate. The following month, she won outright in Seefeld. Throughout the season, Brabec delivered consistent results, with a worst individual finish of fourth, albeit multiple times.
“From the results perspective, it’s about the consistency we’re seeing across multiple athletes,” Stephanie Wilson recently wrote to Nordic Insights of the Americans’ performance last season. Wilson is a board member of Nordic Combined USA. “Alexa, Annika, and Tara are proving the U.S. can compete regularly with the best, which is a meaningful shift for both Nordic Combined in the U.S. and for the sport internationally.”
A writer observed the parallel between the burgeoning success of the nordic combined women and the results that followed Kikkan Randall and Jessie Diggins leading the U.S. cross-country team to its first Olympic gold in 2018.
“These women are showing young girls what is possible in this sport,” Wilson wrote. “You can’t be what you can’t see.”
“I have really looked up to Jessie Diggins and the way she has helped to reshape U.S. cross country skiing over the last years,” concurred Brabec.
In her email, Wilson also gave a shoutout to Annika Malacinski’s younger brother, Niklas, who along with Loomis represented the American men at the 2026 Winter Olympics. “Statements by commentators during the Olympics, identifying [Niklas] as one to watch in future OWG, are also impactful,” she wrote.
Alexa Brabec kindly gave time to answer a reporter’s questions. What was it like to land that first podium?
“It felt pretty unbelievable to get onto the podium that first time,” she wrote. “It seemed pretty unreal, because honestly up until quite recently, I didn’t really think that getting onto the podium was something that ever was in the cards for me. It has been a long road from the very bottom of the results sheet to make it up to the top three, which is something I am extremely proud of.”
Did Brabec change up her training over the summer? Significant changes, not so much. But the little things add up. Details, details.
“I think it was small changes over time,” Brabec mused, “like slowly increasing my cross country hours and then just continuously working on jumping technique. Improvements on the ski jumping side made the biggest difference, and it is the side of the sport that I have been putting a bit more time into these last few years. It has been a lot about building some consistency and dialing in more of the smaller details.”
Are there good days and rough days on the ski jump?
“There were good and bad jumps for me as well this season, which is just part of sport,” Brabec wrote. “What’s been helping me to keep the range between good and bad jumps closer is building muscle memory through lots of imitations on the ground and then keeping my focus extremely simple to just one or two things for each jump and oftentimes keeping that same focus for the entire weekend or multiple weekends.”
In the 2020/2021 season, Tara Geraghty-Moats won the inaugural women’s nordic combined World Cup. After that season, she turned her attention back to biathlon. This year marked Geraghty-Moats’s return to nordic combined. Between 2021 and the 2025 Flaming Leaves Festival last fall, Geraghty-Moats’s only jumps were three times as a forejumper for the 2025 Nordic Combined Junior World Championships in Lake Placid.
“It felt like every week this winter just kept getting better and being more fun than the last,” Geraghty-Moats wrote. “It was very fulfilling to start the winter at the bottom of the field and finish the winter in second place [in Oslo, large hill / 5 km]. I knew women’s nordic combined had made a lot of progress since I had last competed, and I didn’t know if or when I could achieve top results again, so I’m really happy I was able to progress over the season.”
Although Geraghty-Moats won a national championship in October, she wasn’t named to the national team. The nordic combined national team is named every May. Starting from scratch, Geraghty-Moats paid her own way over to Europe this winter through savings, crowdfunding, and a modest grant. The Czech nordic combined team helped with waxing. Tomas Matura of Czechia has been Geraghty-Moats’s coach for nordic combined from day one, as shown in the below Instagram shoutout.
Now that the 2026 Winter Olympics are in the rearview mirror, the IOC will “conduct a full evaluation” of nordic combined before rendering a verdict on the sport’s Olympic future. According to NordicMag, IOC will review the sport’s “universality and audience” before making a decision on its future this June.
It’s difficult to discuss universality when the IOC reduced the number of [men’s] NoCo Olympic quota spots from 55 in 2022 to 36 this year. One impact of the roster reduction has been that the large hill/team relay was reduced from four competitors for each team down to just two. Fewer roster spots also translates to fewer opportunities for non-traditional winter sports nations.
The IOC has complained about limited competition, with Norway and Germany dominating the results since the first Winter Olympics in 1924. Should men’s cross-country skiing, a sport where Norway has nearly 60 percent more gold medals than its nearest competitor across the past century, be taken off the Olympic roster, at least until one Johannes Høsflot Klæbo turns, I don’t know, 45 years old? Should women’s slalom also be removed, at least until Mikaela Shifrin hangs them up?
Hopefully, the U.S. squad bursting into the spotlight will influence the IOC to not only keep (men’s) nordic combined in future Olympics, but also add women’s nordic combined alongside it. Stay tuned.
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