Annika Malacinski is used to the brink.
Whether perched at the lip of a 100-meter ski jump or grinding through the final stretch of a 10-kilometer cross-country race, the 24-year-old Nordic combined ski racer from Steamboat Springs knows what it feels like to teeter on the edge — physically and mentally. That tension, she says, is part of Nordic combined’s unique appeal: The sport marries the explosive courage of ski jumping with the relentless endurance of cross-country skiing.
But now, it’s not just Malacinski — or the other women competing at the highest level — who find themselves on the edge. The sport itself is in crisis. Despite a century of Olympic history on the men’s side, the International Olympic Committee, or IOC, refused to add a women’s Nordic combined event to the 2026 Winter Games in Milan-Cortina, making it the only Olympic sport that doesn’t have a women’s competition. Unless that decision is reversed for 2030 or possibly 2034 in Salt Lake City, the entire discipline risks being cut from the Olympic program altogether.
When the Nordic combined community received the news that the IOC had deemed the sport “not applicable for the women’s category,” at the 2026 Games it felt like a gut punch. The ruling came despite the sport meeting key benchmarks set by the IOC: Women’s Nordic combined has held three World Championships (Oberstdorf 2021, Planica 2023 and Trondheim 2025), features a growing World Cup circuit, and now includes athletes from more countries than some Olympic mainstays, like skeleton. Still, the IOC pointed to low broadcast ratings on the men’s side and a perceived lack of podium diversity as reasons to deny women’s inclusion.
Nordic combined has a long legacy at the Olympic Games. The sport made its Olympic debut in 1924 at the first Winter Games in Chamonix. A men’s team event was added in 1988, and by 2022, a third event, men’s large hill individual, joined the program. But after a full century on the Olympic stage, women have still never been allowed to compete.
It’s a reality that leaves Todd Wilson, longtime director of the ski jumping and Nordic combined program at the Steamboat Springs Winter Sports Club, more than a little frustrated. Girls’ participation at the club level has been on a steady uptick for the past two decades, and the sport has undergone a radical professionalization at the competitive level. The lack of Olympic inclusion stands in stark contrast to the progress. For Wilson, who is a two-time Nordic combined Olympian, it’s a confusing step back.
“I have a 17-year-old daughter who’s been to Junior Worlds the last two years. She made the World Championship team this year. She’s an up-and-comer,” Wilson says. “It’s ironic. I grew up in this sport and had a pathway to the Olympics. Now she’s growing up in the same sport in the 2020s and doesn’t.”
Despite a centurylong Olympic legacy, the sport is also straining under an existential threat. The International Olympic Committee has repeatedly rejected women in Nordic combined Olympic contests.
The committee in 2022 informed the sport’s governing body that it may cut Nordic combined altogether from the 2030 Winter Olympics lineup, citing a recent assessment of the last three Winter Olympics that shows low audience numbers and a handful of countries harvesting most of the sport’s medals.
The situation has put athletes like Malacinski in a precarious position. With the 2030 Olympic program slated for final review this summer, the stakes are high. In addition to a full-time schedule of training, travel and competition, Malacinski has had to pick up an additional duty: advocate. She fields interviews, sits on panels, and recently became the star of a short documentary called “Annika: Where She Lands.”
“Anything to spread awareness,” she says. “Most people have no idea that because I’m a woman I’m not allowed to compete at the Olympics.”
“A double life”
Malacinski stumbled into the sport of Nordic combined through a combination of boredom, curiosity and general competitiveness. A stereotypical Steamboat kid, she and her younger brother Niklas were raised outdoors. Swimming in summer, skiing in winter, riding horses, playing soccer. “We basically played every sport in the book,” Malacinski says.
But their childhood also held an unusual twist: Every August, they flew to their mother’s native Finland for the start of school; each December, they returned to Colorado for Christmas and the spring semester.
“I had a crazy childhood. First semester in Finland, second in the U.S., all the way up to senior year,” Malacinski says. “Finland has one of the best education systems, so my mom wanted us to experience that, and be around family. In some sense, I lived a double life. Funny enough, the sport I do feels like a double life, too.”
Cross-country skiing, one half of the Nordic combined event, had been part of Malacinski’s upbringing since toddlerhood. Her mother insisted on year-round endurance sports — cross-country skiing and swimming — for her kids, despite the fact that young Annika was not a fan. “I’d leave the house crying,” she says. However, in high school things changed.
“I was a good skier, and I was winning competitions,” she says. “I had friends on the team, so it was more about having fun than results, which made me fall in love with the sport.”
Yet skiing was still not the young athlete’s focus. By the age of 12, Malacinski had committed to one activity entirely: She was on track to become an elite-level gymnast. In Finland, she trained with a Hungarian coach; back in Colorado she spent most of her free time at the gym. “I didn’t have much of a social life,” she says.
Over the years, the sport took its notorious toll on Malacinski’s developing body, and at 16 she made the difficult decision to step away from the sport. Yet quitting gymnastics, a sport that often comes baked with Olympic aspiration, also unearthed a deeper truth for Malacinski: She wasn’t ready to abandon the pursuit of high-level athletics.
“I really felt like I was meant for more,” she says. “I wanted to push myself to be someone that isn’t just going to school and working, like a normal person. I really felt like I was destined for something else.”
Malacinski didn’t know what that “something else” was until the summer of 2014, when she watched her brother Niklas compete at Steamboat’s annual Fourth of July Jumpin’ & Jammin’ ski jump competition. (Ten years later Niklas would join the U.S. Nordic combined team.) The next day she hiked up to Howelsen Hill with some hand-me-down gear. For the first time, she leaned against the metal bar at the top of the 45-meter jump … and let go.
“To this day it was one of the scariest experiences of my life,” she says. “I didn’t know if I would land or do a flip in the air. I really had no idea. But I just let go. And the feeling I had after one jump, it was like, ‘this is something I want to do. It wasn’t like, ‘I want to go to the Olympics,’ but it was filling this void that I’d had since quitting gymnastics.”
A 100-year Olympic history but never with women
Howelsen Hill has been Steamboat’s proving ground since the 1910s, producing dozens of Olympians in ski jumping, cross-country and Nordic combined. The Steamboat Springs Winter Sports Club has sent more athletes to the Winter Games than any club in North America, forging a deep local legacy that blends community pride with world-class coaching. The Steamboat Springs Winter Sports Club Ski Jumping and Nordic combined programs are currently the largest of their kind in the world, with more than 170 athletes ages 4-20.
According to Wilson, the programs’ director, approximately one-third of the participants in those programs are girls. That’s a far cry from what it looked like when he was racing Nordic combined in the 1980s. Wilson believes that the growth mirrors the global trend of increased girls in sport but also has a lot to do with how his club approaches participation, something he calls “athletic literacy.”
“We encourage kids to try a little bit of everything when they’re young,” Wilson says. “We find they develop faster if they try all the disciplines: alpine, jumping, cross-country. That’s worked out really well, and it’s also encouraged a lot more participation and girls trying things like Nordic combined.”
Globally, Nordic combined has deep roots in winter sport tradition. The discipline originated in 19th-century Norway, designed to crown the most complete skier — someone who could both fly through the air and push their limits on snow. Today, the format remains largely unchanged: athletes compete in ski jumping first, and their scores determine start times for a cross-country race using the Gundersen method. Every 15-point difference on the jump equals a one-minute staggered start, and the first skier across the finish line wins.
After a decade of Olympic tradition, the lack of inclusion of women’s Nordic combined stands in stark contrast to the broader progress of women’s Nordic sports. Women’s cross-country skiing was introduced at the Oslo Games in 1952, and after a long battle, women’s ski jumping was finally added in 2014 at the Sochi Olympics. Yet Nordic combined has remained stubbornly closed to women, even as the sport has grown outside the Olympic spotlight.
Wilson’s front-row seat to the battle, and subsequent victory, to get women’s ski jumping added to the Olympics has given him hope that the same will happen with Nordic combined. “I whole-heartedly believe it will happen,” he says. But the fight is approaching a decade long, with seemingly little progress.
In 2018, the International Olympic Committee announced that women’s Nordic combined would not be included in the 2022 Beijing Games. The decision landed with particular sting, as Beijing was touted as the most gender-equal Winter Olympics to date: 12 of the 15 sports featured the same number of events for men and women. The only exceptions were luge, ski jumping and Nordic combined. But while luge and ski jumping each had one event for women, only Nordic combined had no women’s event at all.
At the time, the IOC claimed the women’s discipline was still too new and needed to demonstrate “specific signs of progress.” But in the years that followed, women in Nordic combined began to do just that. The 2020–21 season featured both a historic first World Cup (won by American Tara Geraghty-Moats) and an inaugural World Championship.
Still, the absence of an Olympic future cast a long shadow. After her dominant 2020–21 season, Geraghty-Moats pivoted to biathlon. After the Milano-Cortina announcement, Italian Annika Sieff left Nordic combined to focus on ski jumping in the hopes of qualifying for the 2026 Olympic Games.
But Malacinski, who recently turned 24, isn’t ready to give up yet.
“Annika: Where She Lands”
Although Malacinski came to Nordic combined relatively late — at 16 — the women’s side of the sport was even younger. Her first World Cup in 2021 was also the first major international event for women competing in Nordic combined. Because the IOC had already set its criteria for Olympic inclusion ahead of the Beijing Games, a sense of urgency hovered over the sport from the very beginning.
But for Malacinski, it felt like there was time. The disappointment of being left out of the 2022 Olympics stung, but at 21, she believed her Olympic dreams were still alive — as long as women’s Nordic combined was included in the 2026 Games in Milano-Cortina.
“We (my brother and I) will end up going together in 2026,” Malacinski confidently told the Steamboat Pilot in January 2022 during the Beijing Olympics.
Just six months later, her hopes were dashed again. While flying back from a training camp in Slovenia, she used the airplane’s spotty Wi-Fi to watch the IOC’s announcement about the 2026 Winter Games program.
“Nordic combined: This is not applicable for the women’s category,” IOC president Thomas Bach read before moving on to the next topic.
Malacinski was stunned. Then devastated.
“There had been no doubt in my mind that we were going to 2026,” she says. “We had checked every box; a world championship, enough nations competing. We had everything the IOC asked of us.”
That tearful moment is captured in the “Annika: Where She Lands” documentary. According to director Mike Schwartz, Malacinski’s story was too important to ignore.
“Here is a world-class athlete dedicating her life to a sport that won’t even allow her to compete on the biggest stage. Before meeting Annika, we had no idea Nordic combined was still the only Olympic discipline closed to women,” Schwartz says. “That realization was jarring, and once we heard her story, it was clear this film had to be made.”
“Annika: Where She Lands” premiered at the 5Point Film Festival in Carbondale last month and will screen at Mountainfilm in Telluride over Memorial Day Weekend. The timing couldn’t be better: The IOC will decide which events make the 2030 Winter Games lineup later this summer. Every bit of awareness helps.
“Right now, the most important thing is making women’s Nordic combined popular, and putting pressure on the IOC,” Malacinski says.
The IOC’s refusal to include women’s Nordic combined ripples far beyond gender equity. Since the Olympics remain the pinnacle of sport, inclusion — or lack thereof — can disrupt the entire ecosystem.
Without Olympic status, funding dries up as national federations shift resources to Olympic disciplines. Media attention evaporates, sponsorships disappear, and athletes struggle to find support.
“Without Olympic goals, sponsorship isn’t even an option for me,” Malacinski says.
Wilson agrees, pointing out that even in Steamboat Springs, one of the few U.S. communities with a strong Nordic combined pipeline, the Olympic decision could cause a domino effect.
“That could be the brick that collapses the whole system,” he says. “If it’s taken out of the Olympics, what happens to national governing bodies? Without a World Cup or World Championships, what’s left?”
Indeed, Nordic combined’s future as an Olympic sport may hinge on achieving gender equity. The IOC has been clear: every discipline must meet modern standards of relevance, global reach and equal opportunity. The exclusion of women in 2026 sparked speculation that the entire sport — men’s and women’s — could be dropped for 2030 unless parity is reached.
“If women don’t get accepted in 2030, the IOC will solve this inequality by eliminating the sport completely,” Malacinski says. “Nordic combined is on the brink of extinction or progression. If we don’t get the women, the men lose, too.”
As the 2030 program enters its final review, the sport teeters on the edge. For Malacinski, it’s a familiar place — the brink. But this time, it’s not just about the leap she’s ready to make. It’s about whether the Olympic movement is willing to catch up.
“I want to fight for all the girls training just as hard as the men,” she said, “and for the little girls who dream of this sport. We deserve to be at the Olympics.”