Todd Wilson wanted to get the vans loaded and get on the road before the news spread.
Every July, the director of the Steamboat Springs Winter Sports Club’s Nordic combined program takes a vanload of young athletes to Park City, Utah, for the Springer Tournee, one of the country’s biggest summer ski jumping festivals. Usually, the morning they leave is buzzing with excitement — kids stuffing gear into trailers, coaches juggling equipment, parents wishing them luck before a week of training alongside the U.S. national team.
As Wilson drove from his house to the clubhouse at Howelsen Hill on July 7, his phone began vibrating. By the time he reached the parking lot, parents and coaches were already waiting.
“I don’t know how to say it, other than it was kind of like there’d been a death,” Wilson said. “They were coming up saying, ‘We don’t know what to say, but we’re so sorry.’ Everyone’s hugging, and people have tears in their eyes. It was a complete shock.”
Hours earlier, the International Olympic Committee had announced that Nordic combined — a sport that has appeared in every Winter Olympics since the inaugural Games in 1924 — would not be part of the 2030 Winter Games in the French Alps.
The news hit especially hard in In Steamboat Springs. The Steamboat Springs Winter Sports Club has sent more athletes to the Winter Olympics than any club in North America. The town has long been synonymous with Nordic combined, producing Olympic medalists Johnny Spillane and Todd Lodwick, who together competed in 10 Winter Games.
Wilson represented Team USA in Nordic combined at the 1988 and 1992 Winter Olympics. His two daughters also grew up in the sport, and his wife, Stephanie, co-founded Nordic Combined USA, a nonprofit that helps support the national team. Few families are more invested in the sport’s future.
For the kids riding in those vans, the Olympic dream had shattered, leaving behind an unsettling question: What’s next for an Olympic sport without the Olympics?
Women weren’t included in the Olympic contests
Nordic combined — a sport pairing ski jumping and cross-country skiing — debuted with the Winter Games in 1924. But in recent years, the International Olympic Committee began questioning whether the discipline still belonged on the Olympic program.
In 2022, the IOC warned the sport’s governing body that Nordic combined risked being dropped from the 2030 Winter Games, citing an assessment of the previous three Olympics that found low television audiences and medals concentrated among only a handful of countries. The committee also pointed to the lack of a women’s Olympic event, even as women had begun competing at the World Cup and World Championship levels.
At the 2026 Winter Games in Milan-Cortina, Nordic combined was the only Olympic discipline without a women’s competition. Athletes and advocates hoped that would change before 2030. Instead, on July 7, the IOC announced it would remove the sport altogether while also celebrating the French Alps Olympics as the first Winter Games to achieve gender parity.
For Steamboat Springs’ Annika Malacinski, one of the world’s top women’s Nordic combined athletes, the news was crushing. For years, Malacinski and other women in the sport had campaigned for Olympic inclusion. Instead, they watched the IOC solve the problem another way
“Athletes are told to dedicate their lives to the Olympic dream — so I did,” she wrote on social media. “I sacrificed years of my life for a sport I love because I believed hard work would earn me the opportunity to compete on the biggest stage in the world. Instead, that opportunity was taken away, and not because we failed to work hard enough, but because the International Olympic Committee chose to erase us.
“I don’t believe equality is achieved by removing opportunities. I believe it’s achieved by creating them. We weren’t asking for special treatment,” she wrote. “We were asking for the same chance every other Olympic athlete gets: the chance to earn it.”
The announcement was also a double blow for Malacinski’s brother, Niklas, who competed for the U.S. Nordic combined team at the Milano-Cortina Games last winter.
“Hearing that the 2030 Olympics would be the first ‘equal’ Winter Games not because women’s Nordic Combined was finally added, but because our sport was removed altogether, was hard to process,” he said.
The decision represents a rare moment in Olympic history. Winter sports are seldom removed from the Olympic program, which is already much smaller than its Summer Games counterpart. The last sport to be pulled was bobsled, which sat out the 1960 Games in Squaw Valley after organizers declined to build a track. It returned for the following Winter Olympics, however, and the IOC says that Nordic combined could return as soon as the 2034 Games in Salt Lake City.
But with the Olympic spotlight currently dimmed, athletes, coaches and supporters are now tasked with another challenge: proving Nordic combined can thrive without the world’s biggest sporting stage. A year ago, Wilson viewed losing the Olympics as an existential threat. Today, he isn’t so sure.
“When we talked a year ago, I was still of the mindset that the Olympics were the pinnacle, the only way,” he said. “I’m not thinking that as much anymore. This is not doomsday. This is not the end. We’re encouraging our kids to stay the course, to see what happens. Just like in sport, we watch the terrain and we pivot as we need to.”
That change in perspective didn’t happen overnight. Over the last Olympic cycle, Wilson watched opportunities at the highest level narrow even before the IOC’s decision. Quota spots shrank. The U.S. men’s team in Milan-Cortina consisted of just two athletes. Women, despite building one of the deepest fields in the world, still weren’t allowed to compete.
“I watched the Olympic team to be two men, no women,” he said. “Two men competing in an event every four years … is that worth training your whole career for?”
Instead, Wilson has begun measuring the sport’s health differently. Women’s Nordic combined now features a World Cup circuit and World Championships, and three Americans — Alexa Brabec, Annika Malacinski and Tara Geraghty-Moats — finished last season ranked among the world’s top 11.
“There are many amazing athletes who had great careers who never competed in the Olympics,” Wilson said. “I don’t think this defines us.”
Since the IOC’s decision was announced, Niklas Malacinski has been experiencing a similar shift in perspective.
“Of course it affects my motivation,” Malacinski said in an email. “The Olympics are a huge goal for every athlete, and losing that opportunity adds another challenge. But this also puts my ‘why’ to the test. I never started doing Nordic Combined because of the Olympics. I do it because I genuinely love the sport, the process, and the challenge. That hasn’t changed.”
Jumping toward a more level playing field
Wilson’s newfound optimism isn’t rooted in the belief that the IOC made the right decision. It comes from a different realization: In many ways, American Nordic combined had already spent years learning how to survive without the institutions that once sustained it.
Over the last two decades, the sport has lost the support of organizations traditionally responsible for developing Olympic athletes. U.S. Ski & Snowboard stopped financially supporting Nordic combined years ago, leaving athletes, coaches and volunteers to build much of the sport’s infrastructure themselves. Today, Nordic Combined USA, a nonprofit founded in 2024, supports most of the U.S. national team’s operations.
According to Stephanie Wilson, one of Nordic Combined USA’s founders, the nonprofit was formed by a group of parents to advocate for women’s Olympic inclusion. But as it became clear the sport also lacked the organizational and financial support needed to sustain a national team, the mission evolved.
“We pivoted,” she said. “It became obvious that for the sport to move forward, a new organization needed to form.”
Today, Nordic Combined USA raises nearly all of the team’s funding, coordinates coaching and logistics, oversees athlete development from promising juniors through the World Cup level, and helped establish a partnership with the Norwegian Ski Federation that allows American athletes to train in Europe, where nearly every major competition takes place.
“We really are the glue that brings it all together,” Stephanie Wilson said.
The Olympic announcement has forced another round of difficult conversations for Nordic Combined USA, but not necessarily a change in direction.
“I think we’ve moved through all the emotions,” Wilson said. “At first it was shock. Then it was, ‘Oh my gosh, what does this mean for the athletes?’ Then you step back and remember this is an event that happens every four years. It doesn’t define them. And then you swing back again.”
Todd Wilson has already found a silver lining. Because Nordic combined has already learned to operate outside the traditional Olympic funding system in the U.S., he believes it may be better positioned than some of the sport’s European counterparts, whose national governing bodies could face financial consequences after losing Olympic status.
“I think now a lot of the powerhouse Nordic combined countries may lose their funding,” he said. “It could actually level the playing field. I’m not saying it will, but it’s an interesting idea that we might be on a more even playing field instead of us being outgunned constantly by these powerhouses.”
While no one knows what the sport will look like five or 10 years from now, Stephanie Wilson wonders if success simply gets measured differently.
“I wonder if families and kids shift the paradigm. ‘I want to be an Olympian’ becomes ‘I want to win the World Championships,’ or ‘I want to be No. 1 in the World Cup standings,'” she said.
In a sense, that shift was already beginning. Long before the IOC’s announcement, a small group of coaches, athletes and organizers had been quietly imagining a different future for Nordic combined — one that didn’t depend entirely on the Olympic movement. For the past two years, Stephanie Wilson and other leaders in the sport have been developing the Velocity League, a new professional competition series designed to make Nordic combined faster, more spectator-friendly and, perhaps most importantly, financially sustainable for athletes.
Instead of countries competing against one another, teams would draft athletes from around the world, with competitions compressed into a television-friendly format.
“The athletes are excited,” Wilson said. “We’re not creating something crazy. We’re creating something that’s geared toward viewers but built for athletes. Something so they can make reasonable money doing what they do, inspire a development pipeline to grow, and make something that’s really fun for people to watch.”
The league, which organizers hope to launch in 2027, is still seeking investors and sponsors. Athletes, like Olympian Niklas Malacinski, have embraced the idea, too.
“It’s a really positive step for Nordic combined and shows that the sport continues to evolve, even outside of the Olympic movement,” he said.
That’s the lesson Wilson, the Steamboat coach, has repeated since the IOC announced it was pulling Nordic combined from the Olympic Games. A year ago, he viewed the Olympics as the pinnacle — the thing every athlete chased and every coach worked toward. Now, after watching his athletes absorb the biggest disappointment their sport has faced in a century, he sees something else.
“Some of the most important chapters in sports history have begun with a door closing,” he said.
Back at the Springer Tournee, kids were once again climbing the in-run stairs in oversized jumping boots. They jumped for the first time, encouraged by national team athletes and coaches. Older athletes avoided the searing heat by roller skiing indoors on treadmills.
“Watching these kids put on jumping suits in 90 degrees and giving it their all,” Wilson said, “that’s worth more than the Olympics.”
For a while, at least, the future of Nordic combined wasn’t the most important thing in the world.