The 2026 Olympics are being hailed as the most gender-equal Winter Games in history.
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) said these Games — held across northern Italy — would boast 47 per cent female participation, with a record 50 women's events on the program.
No, it's not quite the full gender parity the Summer Olympics in Paris achieved in 2024 — it has only been 102 years since the first Winter Olympics, after all — but it is another significant step forward.
As then-IOC president Thomas Bach said in 2022: "We are committed to continuing to advance gender equality, and Milano Cortina will be another key milestone in this endeavour."
There remains one glaring outlier, though.
The historic sport of Nordic Combined, with over 100 years of Olympic heritage, remains an exclusively male domain — the only sport in the entire Olympic family that remains in a sporting dark age.
What is Nordic Combined?
According to American skier Annika Malacinski, Nordic Combined is "one of the most bad-ass sports" around — and it's easy to see why.
"Most athletes train for one sport and one sport only," Malacinski told ABC Sport from where she is based in Finland.
"But what's so crazy and cool about Nordic Combined is that we are training for two completely different sports … you are supposed to stay light for ski jumping, and also have the energy and muscle to ski really fast.
"This is a cool sport. The ski jumping … also the fight for the victory in the cross-country, that's just so cool on its own.
"It makes me so happy that I can show other people how cool this sport is."
Contested in a single day (starting tonight at 7:10pm AEDT), athletes start by leaping to earn points for distance and style on the ski jump in the morning, displaying precision, power and explosive strength in a nerve-shredding battle against gravity.
The points earned in the ski jump translate to a time advantage at the start of a lung-busting endurance cross-country ski race, setting up a thrilling handicap-style sprint to the line for victory.
It is one of the Winter Olympics' original events, having appeared at every Games since 1924 in Chamonix.
The sport's roots date back even further than that, though — the first-ever competition took place at Oslo's historic Holmenkollen Ski Festival in 1892 to identify the best all-round skier.
Nordic Combined is big news in Norway, which is perhaps why the nation has dominated the event at the Olympics, winning a total of 15 gold medals.
Even the discipline's foothold in America boils down to the visit of Norwegian legend Karl Hovelsen to Steamboat Springs, Colorado in about 1910, where he established a ski jump hill and cross-country trails. Steamboat Springs, as well as being the hometown of Malacinski, is now known as Ski Town USA.
Germany and its various iterations (West Germany, East Germany and the United Team of Germany) are also considered a powerhouse nation, winning a combined 12 golds, with Finland (4), Austria (3) and Japan (2) the other Olympic medal winners — which is, admittedly, not an enormous spread of nations to have succeeded at the highest level.
Incidentally, Australia has only ever had one Nordic Combined athlete compete at an Olympics. Hal Nerdal, a Norwegian who moved to Australia to work on the Snowy Hydro scheme in the 1950s, finished 31st out of 33 at the 1960 Games in Squaw Valley, USA.
Coincidentally, those Games were the first where a Nordic nation did not win gold, with German legend Georg Thoma ending Norway's run of six wins in seven Games (Finland's Heikki Hasu won the other event in 1948).
A gymnast's Olympic dream turned sour
Malacinski was a relative latecomer to Nordic Combined.
The now-24-year-old only took up the sport when she was 16 after previously dabbling in a variety of sports, including competitive gymnastics.
It was the thrill of ski jumping that got Malacinski interested in Nordic Combined in the first place. Her younger brother, Niklas, had already started in the sport and, on account of her Finnish mother and ski-instructor father, she had a solid grounding on skis: "There's so much Nordic in me and my blood," Malacinski explains.
Despite that grounding, perhaps it's only reasonable that she would take to the skies, sparked by a major event in Steamboat Springs.
"I committed to gymnastics very heavily at 12, and then at 16, ultimately decided that I had to be done with it," Malacinski said.
"So I went through this period of time that I just didn't know what I was doing in life … I was honestly depressed. I didn't know what I wanted to do.
"On 4th of July in Steamboat Springs, we have this huge [ski jumping] event called Jumpin' and Jammin', it's super fun, the whole town comes and watches.
"I remember watching my brother, he was 14 at the time, and he almost won out of a bunch of 20-plus-year-olds.
"Sitting there, I was just like, 'Would it be crazy if I just went off one of those things?'"
To anyone who has ever seen a ski jump up close, the answer to that question is undoubtedly, yes, but Malacinski decided to give it a go anyway — and she's not looked back since.
As Malacinski developed in the sport, her thoughts inevitably turned back to one of the things she dreamed about doing as a gymnast, competing at an Olympic Games and becoming an Olympian.
Incredibly, despite being one of the top Nordic Combined skiers in the world, she's no closer to achieving that dream.
Why is Nordic Combined men-only?
"Me and my brother do the same sport. We compete at the same competitions and yet, because he is a man, he is allowed to go compete at the Olympics and I'm not," Malacinski said.
"That, in my head, is just already so ridiculous living in 2025 and going into 2026.
"I want to show the IOC that they made a horrible mistake in underestimating us."
She's unlikely to be the only one, so why is Nordic Combined still men-only?
Nordic skiing has decidedly militaristic origins — it started as a way for Norwegian and Swedish soldiers to practice their skiing skills in the late 19th century — which perhaps offers one explanation as to why a misogynistic mindset has prevailed for so long.
The other reason boils down to the same nonsensical sexism that held female athletes back in so many other sports.
The biggest initial obstacle was ski jumping, which women had been barred from competing in until the early 2000s — despite, bafflingly, frequently being used to test hills prior to men being allowed to jump in competition.
Simply put, it was deemed that women were too fragile to stand up to the rigours of repeatedly hurtling themselves off the side of a mountain.
How was such an outdated view allowed to persist for so long?
The attitude of former International Ski Federation (FIS) president Gian-Franco Kasper offers one suggestion, after he told National Public Radio that ski jumping "seems not to be appropriate for ladies from a medical point of view".
Incredibly, he made those comments in 2005.
That was bad enough, but there was worse.
American ski jumper Lindsey Van was once infamously warned by an unidentified person that her uterus would fall out while she was competing, while Malacinski recalled being told women should not ski jump "because they thought our ovaries would explode".
Needless to say, much like the pioneering women's Marathon runners who were threatened with similar consequences from a bevy of pseudoscientists during the 20th century, neither of those things has happened.
The discourse had taken place while female ski jumpers fought to be allowed to compete at the Olympic Games, a battle that started in 1998 and finally came to fruition in 2014, just five years after women were finally granted their own World Cup series.
Even then, though, it's only at these 2026 Games that women will be allowed to leap off the large hill at an Olympics, having previously been limited to the smaller, normal hill — for reference, the size of the normal hill at the iconic Zhangjiakou Snow Ruyi is 106 metres, while the large one is 140m.
The delay in giving women the same opportunities as their male counterparts in ski jumping had an understandable knock-on effect with Nordic Combined competition, which only had its first official World Cup event in 2020 and its first world championships in 2021.
It was half-expected that the Beijing 2022 Games would see the introduction of a women's Nordic Combined, but the reality was somewhat different.
"They [the IOC] made this decision in 2022 and, in my head, and so many other Nordic Combined girls' heads, there was no chance they were not adding us for 2026," Malacinski said.
"We had a checklist of everything that the Olympic Committee wanted to see us progress in, and we checked off every single one.
"There was not even a thought in my head that they weren't going to allow us to go to 2026, because the goal was 2022.
"That [2022 Beijing Games] would have been very, very soon, and a very 50-50 shot. But for '26? No doubt in my mind that they were not gonna add us. Like, how could they not?
"And then, when they came out with the decision that they weren't going to add us, it was horrible."
The decision was met with huge frustration among those in the sport.
Billy Demong, a five-time Olympian in Nordic Combined and member of USA Nordic's board of directors, told The Associated Press the decision was a "travesty".
"This is one of the biggest moves against gender equity in the Olympic movement in history," he said.
And while the sport's governing body, the FIS, is committed to achieving gender parity at the 2030 Games, Malacinski admits that in the immediate aftermath of the decision, she thought about retiring or switching to focus solely on ski jumping.
But, instead, she discovered the fire to fight, not just for her fellow competitors, but for the very sport itself.
"In my head, it was the end until I realised that there's one competition in four years that I don't get to participate in," Malacinski said.
"We have World Cups, the World Championships, Youth Olympics, we have everything except for this one competition, so to me it was stupid that I was like, 'Am I quitting now?'
"That was kind of like what ignited the fire in me to fight for this."
Nordic Combined 'thrown overboard'
Nordic combined remains the solitary anachronism when it comes to the IOC's gender equality ambitions.
But it's not just the women's side of the program that has an issue. It appears that the entire sport is on borrowed time in terms of its continued status at the Olympics.
In June 2022, the IOC's executive board discussed "the concerning situation" regarding Nordic Combined, saying it had "by far the lowest audience numbers during [the last three] Games" and a critical lack of diversity in terms of medal winners.
Just four different countries have claimed the last 27 medals on offer in the sport at the past three Games: Germany (10), Norway (9), Austria (4) and Japan (4).
[GRAPH]Only 12 different nations have ever won a medal in Nordic Combined events at either the Olympics or the World Championships.
The 18 different nations represented by the 55 athletes who competed in the sport at the last Games in Beijing were the lowest of any non-team sport at those Games.
The only thing keeping Nordic Combined in the program at all was the "decisive argument" around the fact that male athletes had already been preparing for Milan for many years.
"The inclusion of Nordic Combined in the Olympic Winter Games 2030 depends on a significant positive development, particularly with regard to participation and audience," the executive committee noted.
Malacinski is scathing in her response.
"How are you supposed to progress the sport if you don't have the Olympics [as a target]?" Malacinski argues.
"The younger girls don't want to go do a sport that doesn't allow women in the Olympics. They're going to choose ski jumping or cross-country skiing.
"[The IOC are] telling us to swim, but they've tied our hands and feet together and thrown us overboard.
"I think the biggest problem is that we have these old white men on these boards that don't know anything."
At the time, the IOC executive board had 10 men and five women sitting on it. Currently, the board consists of six women and nine men.
One of the biggest issues appears to be the interest the sport sparks from the audience.
This too is a bit unfair — the last two Games have taken place in Asia, with time zones unfavourable with Nordic Combined's core (and likely, only) audience of northern and central Europe, which no doubt would have contributed to the lower-than-expected audience figures.
"Basically, the fate of us being added is how much they can profit, and that has been kind of like the disgusting aspect of the Olympics," Malacinski said.
"[The Olympics] is something that I've dreamed of since I was a little kid, looking up at all these athletes that have gone through crazy training, and their journey and what's happened in their life and the work they've put into this.
"That is all so distraught in my head right now because all I see is that the Olympics, all they care about is money and politics.
"That is the one thing that I've learned throughout this whole process, and it has completely destroyed my idea of what the Olympics is.
"It's almost like, 'Why do I even want to go if this is what they care about, money, who can profit?'
"But, unfortunately, I feel that you're not taken seriously as an athlete if you don't have the opportunity to compete at the Olympics."
Is the focus on Nordic Combined fair?
Malacinski admits the sport is "very niche" but argues that the same is true of just about every winter sport.
And that is true. Almost all winter sports struggle for genuine diversity in terms of nations competing purely on account of snow being a necessary and undeniable requirement to any nation that wants to develop a grassroots scene.
In fact, the low number of different nations competing in Nordic Combined in Beijing (18) was not vastly different from other sports such as Skeleton (21), Ski Jumping (22), Bobsleigh (23) and Short Track (23).
At the sport's respective world championships in 2025, Nordic Combined compared relatively favourably to sports from a diversity perspective.
[GRAPH]And that in itself isn't surprising.
These are incredibly specialised, niche sports with a high degree of danger and requirements for specialist equipment and facilities that are simply not widely available.
For example, there are only 59 ski jumping centres in 18 countries around the globe currently certified for top-level use by the FIS. In a similar vein, there are only 17 top-level bobsled tracks in 12 different countries.
Access is clearly an issue when snow and ice are required.
Malacinski points out that there are improvements happening all the time in terms of representation, and her sport is no different in terms of participation than cross-country skiing or bobsled.
"The progress that we have made in this sport doesn't even seem real; it's crazy," Malacinski argues.
"Norway has been dominating for quite some time because they are amazing at this sport and in all Nordic sports. But if you look at any world championships for cross-country skiing, you will see that top 10 majority is also Norwegian," she said.
"Whereas when you look at our world championships in Slovenia, and then also in Trondheim last year, we had three nations on the podium."
At the World Championships in Trondheim, across six different events, Nordic Combined had four different nations from three different continents stand on the podiums, with three of those winning a gold.
Of the 12 gold medals on offer in cross-country skiing at those championships, Norway and Sweden shared the spoils with six golds each.
"It doesn't make sense," Malacinski said, in light of these results, regarding the IOC's argument that there needed to be more diversification of talent in the sport.
"I just want the IOC to get their head out of their asses and, like, tell us what's actually happening behind the curtain, because everything they say just does not make sense."
What comes next?
Malacinski will be in Italy in February. Her brother is on the USA Nordic Combined team, and she will be there supporting him.
But she won't be competing. If that continues, she's concerned that come 2030, her brother won't have a spot to compete for at the Olympics either.
"There's no way that the Olympics can go through another cycle and not have 100 per cent equality on the board," Malacinski said.
"So if women are not allowed to compete in 2030, there is no way that they're letting the men go through another round without the women.
"Not that they [the IOC] care, but because it just looks bad for them, and it looks bad now.
"It's a legendary sport, and I would hate to see it diminish because of politics and money, so it's something that this whole sport has to fight for.
"But I've noticed that we do not have a lot of big personalities in this sport. A lot of the time, I feel very alone trying to fight for this.
"When the decision came out, the year after, the women were putting X on our poles, as in no exceptions, and that was on for a year, and the men in some of the competitions did it as well.
"But I really feel that no-one is outspoken enough about it. There's not huge personalities that are able to just throw this stuff on social media … you're not going to find what you find in other sports, in freestyle skiing [for example], these really, really big personalities.
"And at the end of the day, that's going to kill us."
Malacinski will continue to push, the fate of her sport resting heavily, it seems, on her shoulders.
"I am trying to make sure that the Olympics put our sport into 2030 for both men and women," she said.
"But I've noticed how small the IOC can make me feel compared to how big they are, and how much power they have. And anything they say goes, and it doesn't really have any repercussions.
"I don't ever want to come to the point where I feel like I didn't do enough because the Olympic committee will decide my fate, along with the whole sport of Nordic Combined, after these Winter Olympics.
"If they say no, then the sport will be wiped out, and it's like that, I can't do anything about it."
