Welcome to your go-to guide to the 2026 Winter Olympics. We’re tracking everything—from real-life heated rivalries (yes, they exist) to under-the-radar sports and surprise standouts—so you can catch up on all of our coverage in one place.
In 2022, I was somewhere over the Atlantic, flying home from a training camp in Slovenia and watching a live broadcast as the president of the International Olympic Committee announced decisions for the 2026 Games. I kept refreshing the livestream as it buffered and froze (the overpriced Wi-Fi was pretty wonky), waiting for him to reveal the plans for Nordic combined. I was barely blinking, barely breathing. Minutes felt like hours. I kept checking, thinking maybe I’d missed something.
But the truth is it would not have mattered if I had missed his announcement. Of course, I didn’t miss it. Even worse, l knew what the IOC president would say even before he completed the sentence: Women wouldn’t be included in Nordic combined racing in the 2026 Winter Games.
I had been training for five years for my sport, and I was beyond ready to rewrite history. I even had a quiet thought about asking the flight attendant for a glass of champagne in anticipation of the announcement.
Instead, I cried for eight hours straight.
Sitting there, suspended in the air, the reality that my dream would stay just out of reach for another four years weighed heavily on me.
By the time we landed, my eyes were so swollen I could barely see. Somewhere between Europe and home, the dream I had built my life around—trained for, sacrificed for, fought for—disappeared.
As the 2026 Winter Games begin, Nordic combined will remain the only Olympic ski discipline where men compete but women are still excluded. The question has never been whether we’re capable of performing in the sport. It is whether we’re allowed to jump from the same hill and stand on the same stage as men.
For the uninitiated, Nordic combined is a unique winter sport that combines ski jumping and cross-country skiing into one competition. Athletes start with ski jumping, where they earn points for distance and form. Those points are then used to determine staggered start times for the cross-country race. The first skier to cross the finish line wins.
Nordic combined has been part of the Winter Olympic Games since 1924. Despite that long history, women have never been allowed to compete in the sport at the Olympic level. And it’s not for lack of trying. There were formal proposals to include women for both the 2022 and 2026 Games. Both were denied.
