‘Gone is a dream’: Nordic combined athletes left devastated by Olympic snub

Nordic combined athletes around the world are mourning the sport’s disappearance from the Olympic stage after the International Olympic Committee announced Tuesday it was cutting the discipline from the 2030 Games in favor of freeride skiing and snowboarding.

The sport, which features ski jumping and cross-country skiing, has been a part of every Winter Olympics since the Games began in 1924. But in a rare move, the IOC cut the discipline, citing struggling viewership, audience and podium diversity and depth.

“Today the biggest defeat didn’t happen on the field,” wrote French Nordic combined athlete Romane Baud on Instagram. “It happened in the IOC meeting room. Congratulations @iocofficial you broke thousand hearts and dreams.”

The decision is particularly heartbreaking for women’s Nordic combined athletes such as Baud, who never got to compete at the Olympic level in the first place. Nordic combined has been men-only at the Olympics, and it was the only sport at the 2026 Games without a women’s competition.

Though women’s Nordic combined didn’t host its first World Cup season until 2020-21, advocacy had grown since then to add a women’s category to the Olympic program. In 2022, the IOC denied the request for the 2026 Games, instead telling the entire sport it needed to grow its profile to keep its spot in the Olympics.

Instead, the IOC announced Tuesday the addition of freeride skiing and snowboarding, along with synchronized figure skating, as a win for gender equality in the Games, because those new events will include both men and women. The IOC said it went that route, rather than creating gender parity by adding women’s Nordic combined, because its focus was on assessing the future of the discipline as a whole.

“For us, it was really a debate not so much about the parity within the disciplines but the two factors I mentioned before, which is low popularity and their having a high concentration of a few countries at the top of the sport,” Pierre Ducrey, IOC sports director, said in a news conference after the announcement.

But for women’s Nordic combined athletes, it was the latest in a long line of snubs from the IOC.

“I’m at a lack of words right now, so many emotions, utterly devastated and so angry at the same time,” said Nathalie Armbruster, a German athlete who won the overall women’s Nordic combined trophy in 2025 and finished fourth in 2026. “Gone is a dream we have put so much effort in.”

The decision also means men such as Norway’s Jens Lurås Oftebro, who swept all three Nordic combined events at the 2026 Games, will not be able to defend their status on the Olympic podium.

“For all of us who love combined, this feels like the end of an era,” he wrote in Norwegian on Instagram. “I still hope that this will not be the last chapter. Combined, it means far too much to far too many people for the story to end here.”

The IOC said Tuesday that Nordic combined ranked lowest in its “popularity indicators” measurements across Winter Olympic disciplines in 2014, 2018, 2022 and 2026, and noted only five countries combined to win all the medals on offer in the sport at those Games (and only two of them, Norway and Germany, won golds). In contrast, the IOC decided to retain snowboard’s parallel giant slalom event, which was also potentially on the chopping block for 2030, saying the discipline “demonstrated significant improvement since Beijing 2022 across a number of popularity indicators.”

“Sport and athletic performance are no longer the only things being judged,” wrote American Olympian Niklas Malacinski in a statement on Instagram after the decision. “Lobbying, politics, marketability, and media metrics increasingly influence decisions. It feels less about celebrating unique, demanding sports and the athletes who dedicate their lives to mastering them, and more about click numbers and public perception.”

Now, the future of the sport is in flux, especially when young athletes could choose to specialize in just ski jumping or cross-country skiing, and have a shot at the Olympics.

“It’s definitely a gut punch,” said Jill Brabec, president of Nordic Combined USA, the nonprofit created to save the sport in the U.S. after USA Nordic Sport stopped financially supporting the discipline in 2024, citing financial challenges.

Brabec’s daughter Alexa finished second in the World Cup race last season. After Tuesday’s news, the family is focusing on the World Cup season ahead.

“I think the reaction through the whole Nordic combined community, everyone from athletes, coaches, parents, fans, has been heartbreak,” Brabec said. “But I’m also seeing a lot of resiliency. We’re going to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, and we are going to move forward into a season of World Cups and world championships.”

There’s no doubting the Games are a major marketing and sponsorship opportunity, especially for a sport without a large global profile year-round.

“I think we’re going to have to have some serious conversations with our supporters, with our athletes, and I’m hoping that our donors will still be behind the athletes in this sport, because this doesn’t change who they are or what they do,” Brabec said. “But yeah, the reality is it just made my job 100 times harder.”

The IOC said Nordic combined will be eligible to possibly return to the Games in 2034 in Salt Lake City. In the meantime, the sport hopes to innovate. Even before the IOC announced its decision, a group of Nordic combined supporters, including U.S. Olympic champion Bill Demong, started Velocity Ski League, a private coed league seeking to innovate and grow the sport in partnership with the International Ski and Snowboard Federation. Now, the question will be whether the new league can do what the IOC decided Nordic combined could not — grow interest and excitement in one of the oldest winter sports.

“I think we’ve put a lot of focus on this Olympics, and I think rightly so. I don’t regret what we’ve done,” Brabec said. “But I also don’t think it’s right to let one group, one set of bureaucrats, decide the entire future of a sport.”

She continued, “It’s not the end; it’s just a pivot.”

This article originally appeared in The Athletic.

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