The Last Boys’ Club On Ice: The Only Olympic Sport Without Women Faces 2030 Reckoning

Last Updated:February 13, 2026, 08:00 IST

Nordic combined is one of the oldest and most gruelling disciplines in the Winter Games, having featured in every edition since the inaugural 1924 Chamonix Olympics

On February 11, Norway’s Jens Lurås Oftebro secured a historic gold medal in the Nordic combined normal hill event at the Milano Cortina Winter Olympics, overcoming both a significant time deficit and a dramatic mid-race collision. While the victory cemented Oftebro’s status as a winter sports icon, it also cast a spotlight on the unique and controversial status of Nordic combined as the only remaining Olympic sport that excludes women.

A Test of the ‘Ultimate Athlete’

Nordic combined is one of the oldest and most gruelling disciplines in the Winter Games, having featured in every edition since the inaugural 1924 Chamonix Olympics. It requires a rare blend of explosive power and extreme endurance. The competition is split into two distinct phases:

Phase 1 (Ski Jumping): Athletes jump from a hill (normal or large) and are scored on distance and style.

Phase 2 (Cross-Country Skiing): These scores are converted into time intervals using the Gundersen method. The leader of the jumping round starts the 10 km race first, while others follow based on their calculated time deficits. The first person to cross the finish line wins the gold.

In the 2026 normal hill event, Estonia’s Kristjan Ilves topped the jumping round, while Oftebro started seventh, carrying a 28-second “penalty" (deficit). Despite a mid-race collision where he clipped a rival’s skis and hit the hoarding, Oftebro unleashed a ferocious late surge in the loose, deep snow of Val di Fiemme to beat Austria’s Johannes Lamparter by a single second.

Why Women are Excluded

Despite the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) push for gender parity—with women making up a record 47% of participants at Milano Cortina—Nordic combined remains a male-only enclave. The IOC officially declined to add a women’s event for 2026, citing a lack of “universality". The committee argues that the sport does not yet have a sufficiently large pool of elite female athletes from a diverse enough range of countries to justify Olympic status. Critics and athletes like American Annika Malacinski have fiercely contested this, arguing that the exclusion creates a “chicken and egg" problem: without Olympic inclusion, national federations are reluctant to fund and develop women’s programmes, thereby preventing the very growth the IOC demands.

An Uncertain Future

The future of Nordic combined is currently on a knife-edge. The IOC has placed the entire sport—both men’s and women’s categories—under a “full evaluation" following the 2026 Games. There is a very real possibility that the sport could be dropped entirely for the 2030 French Alps Olympics.

The IOC’s concerns extend beyond gender inequality to low television viewership and the continued dominance of a small handful of nations (primarily Norway, Germany, and Austria). For Nordic combined to survive, it must prove it can modernise, attract a global audience, and, most crucially, provide an equal platform for women. The “war of the shadows" for the sport’s survival will reach its climax in the spring of 2026, when the final decision on the 2030 programme is announced.

News explainers The Last Boys’ Club On Ice: The Only Olympic Sport Without Women Faces 2030 Reckoning

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