Nathalie Armbruster, Daniela Dejori and Annika Malacinski discovered out they’d not be making the 2026 Winter Olympics in June of 2022.
It wasn’t a poor efficiency at the ski leap or a sluggish cross-country ski race. It wasn’t an damage. They didn’t fall simply quick at Olympic trials.
The girls didn’t even get to strive.
That’s as a result of they compete in Nordic mixed, a sport that comes with each cross-country snowboarding and ski leaping, and has been part of the Winter Olympics since the first-ever Games in 1924.
Women have by no means competed in Nordic mixed at the Olympics. The IOC is touting the 2026 Games as “the most gender-balanced Olympic Winter Games in history,” with girls making up 47 % of athletes. Twelve of the 16 disciplines embrace full gender parity. But one self-discipline lacks a girls’s occasion altogether: Nordic mixed.
While girls began competing in cross-country snowboarding at the Olympics in 1952 and ski leaping in 2014, girls’s Nordic mixed didn’t host its first World Cup season till 2020-21. Athletes hoped they’d proven a deep sufficient area and robust sufficient development for the IOC to incorporate the occasion in the 2026 Games.
So in 2022, the girls of Nordic mixed tuned in throughout the world to a YouTube stream, the place the IOC handed down its determination: No girls’s Nordic mixed in 2026.
“My world was crashing down on this day,” stated Armbruster, 20, who competes for Germany.
In truth, the IOC put the complete sport on discover, together with the males: develop the variety of individuals, the variety of nations competing and the measurement of the viewers, or threat 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,” stated Dejori, 23, who grew up in Val Gardena, Italy, lower than 40 miles from the place the males 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 girls’s Nordic mixed, realized the information whereas on a flight. She cried in the airplane toilet.
“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 girls of Nordic mixed are caught sitting on the sidelines whereas their male counterparts compete — and counting on the males’s efficiency to maintain the sport’s future in the Games alive. As the Olympic males’s competitors kicks off on Wednesday, it’s not simply medals which can be at stake. It’s the way forward for one of the Winter Olympics’ authentic sports activities.
After the 2022 determination, Dejori didn’t give up, and neither did Malacinski or Armbruster. Neither did the different girls obsessed not simply with the lung-searing, leg-burning depth of a cross-country ski race, but in addition with the gravity-defying, jaw-dropping sensation of flying.
People ask them why they don’t simply select one or the different — ski leaping or cross-country snowboarding — each of which have a safer standing on the Olympic stage.
But athletes like Armbruster love the duality.
“Being great in both sports is so difficult,” she stated. “In Germany, we call Nordic combined the discipline of the kings and queens.”
Last season, Armbruster gained the general World Cup title, a efficiency that included eight podium appearances with three first-place finishes.
“Now I know that this could have been my Olympic Games,” Armbruster stated.
At a clothes occasion for German athletes in 2025, an interviewer requested Armbruster what she deliberate 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 stated in December. “I cried a lot of tears in the past month.”
German athlete Nathalie Armbruster gained the general girls’s Nordic mixed World Cup title in 2025, however can’t compete at the 2026 Olympics. (Sandra Volk / NordicFocus through Getty Images)
Dejori is at the Games this month in a volunteer uniform, testing the ski leap forward of the opponents.
“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 stated. “It’s just sad.”
Then there’s the monetary piece. Top-level athletes like Armbruster have loads of sponsors, however nonetheless miss out on alternatives with out 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 stated. “It definitely makes a difference.”
Both Armbruster and Dejori are totally supported by their nationwide federations, that are supported by the German and Italian governments, identical to their male counterparts. But in America, the federal authorities doesn’t fund nationwide federations, and in 2024, USA Nordic Sport stopped financially supporting Nordic mixed for each women and men, citing monetary challenges.
That 12 months, a gaggle of oldsters launched Nordic Combined USA, a nonprofit attempting to save lots of a sport that noticed the U.S. males win 4 Olympic medals — one gold and three silver — as not too long ago as 2010.
Jill Brabec, president of Nordic Combined USA, stated that the group wants to lift $500,000 every year to assist the staff. Her daughter, Alexa, has notched seven podiums thus far this season, together with one first-place end, and at the moment sits second general in the World Cup standings.
“In my mind, there’s no other option,” Jill Brabec stated of fundraising, a lot of which comes from non-public donations.
Alexa Brabec (left) and Annika Malacinski at December’s Nordic Combined World Cup in Austria. (AP Photo / Matthias Schrader)
Athletes find yourself paying tens of 1000’s of {dollars} out of pocket, too. The prices add up: coaches, lodges, worldwide flights for coaching camps and competitions. This 12 months, due to a $100 million donation to the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Foundation, each U.S. Olympian and Paralympian who qualifies for the Games will receive a $200,000 grant — cash unavailable to athletes like Brabec and Malacinski, who can’t compete at the Olympics.
Malacinski stated she tries to funds about $50,000 for out-of-pocket prices every year.
“That’s partly donors, individual sponsors that I have, my savings, working as much as I can while I’m home,” stated Malacinski, who is from Steamboat Springs, Colo., and works at a scorching spring and babysits throughout 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, shall be competing at the Olympics in Nordic mixed.
“It’s extremely frustrating because I do exactly what he does,” Malacinski stated. “I ski the same courses. I ski jump the same ski jumps.”
Although they will’t compete, the way forward for the girls’s occasion relies on the efficiency of the males.
“The future inclusion of Nordic combined depends on significant positive developments, particularly with regard to participation and audience,” the IOC stated in an announcement, pointing to the proven fact that at the final three Winter Games, athletes from simply 4 nations — Norway, Germany, Japan and Austria — gained all the medals in the three Olympic Nordic mixed occasions. The IOC needs to diversify the nations that compete in the Winter Olympics, and is contemplating including non-snow sports activities, like cross-country operating, to take action.
The sport has struggled to attract an viewers, too.
“Nordic combined had by far the lowest audience numbers of any discipline of the programme over the last three Games cycles,” the IOC stated.
In 2022, the IOC pointed to the first-ever girls’s Nordic mixed competitors at the Nordic World Ski Championships in 2021, the place girls from simply 10 nations competed and the place Norway took gold, silver and bronze. But the general World Cup win in that first 2020-21 season went to Tara Geraghty-Moats of the U.S., adopted by athletes from Norway and Japan. In 5 years of World Cup competitors, athletes from Germany, Italy, Austria, Slovenia and Finland have additionally joined the podium.
Advocates for Nordic mixed say that the scrutiny over the variety of nations in the sport is a double customary, as a result of European countries dominate a lot of the snow sports activities at the Winter Olympics.
Italian Daniela Dejori, pictured right here ski leaping at a World Cup in 2025, is testing the Olympic leap in Predazzo, Italy, however can’t compete in Nordic mixed. (Lars Baron / Getty Images)
Bill Demong, who gained gold for the U.S. in 2010 and was the govt director of USA Nordic Sport for seven years after his retirement, referred to as the IOC’s figures “trash numbers.” He pointed to the proven fact that the previous few video games had been held in nations the place Nordic sports activities don’t have a big presence, like South Korea and China, middle-of-the-night broadcast instances in the U.S., and extra nations on the podium pre-2014.
“To me it’s an epic fail on (the IOC’s) part,” Demong stated. “If they wanted to be gender equitable, they would have at least added women’s for this (Games).”
Nordic mixed faces different headwinds. Youth growth in the sport depends on entry to each a ski leap and cross-country snowboarding trails, one thing not out there in most of the world. For the girls, constructing a pipeline is difficult with out the risk of the Olympics.
“I don’t think that we can progress as a sport without the Olympics,” Malacinski stated.
Sandra Spitz, Sport & Event Director for the International Ski and Snowboard Federation, stated that in the previous few years, FIS has invested 250,000 Swiss francs yearly in the growth and development of Nordic mixed.
“We felt we have done all the steps, we have seen the growth, we have fulfilled the markers which IOC gave us,” Spitz stated.
When requested about the significance of this 12 months’s Games to the way forward for the sport, Spitz’s reply was clear: “I think it’s decisive.”
The IOC stated Nordic mixed will “undergo a full evaluation” based mostly on information collected throughout the Milan Cortina Games, which can inform whether or not it’s going to embrace the sport in the 2030 Winter Olympics in France.
That means the males competing at the Milan Cortina Games have extra than simply their nation’s medal probabilities on their shoulders.
Niklas Malacinski is aware of the stakes. Growing up, he tried a variety of sports activities, however determined to decide to Nordic mixed when the 2010 U.S. staff gained gold. Making his Olympic debut, Niklas goals of successful his personal and galvanizing the subsequent technology.
“There definitely has been added pressure with potentially the last Olympics,” he stated. “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 girls, whereas they gained’t be at the Olympics, they nonetheless have the remainder of the World Cup racing season forward. The athletes staged a protest at the final World Cup earlier than the Olympics in Seefeld, Austria, at the finish of January, holding up their poles in the form of an X at the beginning line, representing “no exceptions” for girls’s exclusion from the Games.
There’s solidarity amongst this group left out of Milan Cortina, however competitors is nonetheless fierce.
“I’m working my ass off like every man in the sport or like every other athlete in an Olympic discipline,” stated Armbruster, who has notched seven World Cup podiums thus far this season as she seems to defend her title. She at the moment sits in fourth.
When requested if she may inform the IOC something about girls’s Nordic mixed, Armbruster had two phrases:
“Watch us.”