Nordic combination today – curiosity for women – competition over three days

Nordic combined is fighting for its future at the Olympic Games. A curiosity like the upcoming World Cup comes at an inopportune time.

The Nordic Combined will be in Oslo next weekend. Women and men are competing together in the Norwegian capital, but are somehow separated. This ultimately means that the women will only complete their 5-kilometer run around 44 hours after their competition jump.

Usually jump and run in one day

Normally the procedure in Nordic combined looks like this: One competition, one day. That means jumping in the morning and running in the afternoon. An exception is the mass start, where the order is reversed. Nevertheless, the competition takes place within a few hours.

At the World Cup in Oslo, however, the female athletes have to deal with a completely different situation. After the jump on Thursday (5 p.m. in the ticker at sportschau.de) it’s time to pack up and sleep for two nights before hitting the trails. The reason is the different ski jumps that are used and the associated conversion of measurement and transmission technology.

Women not from Holmenkollbakken

Since the combined athletes compete on normal hills, they will not be jumping from the world-famous Holmenkollbakken, but from Midtstubakken, which is about 570 meters away as the crow flies. The men, on the other hand, are in action on the main hill. Since converting the entire technology for distance measurement and TV broadcasting takes a lot of time, the competitions cannot take place on the same day.

In order not to let the women complete their World Cup completely separate from the men, the organizers decided to move the cross-country skiing to the weekend with more spectators.

German team prepared in Norway

It’s another small episode that doesn’t do the combination women’s fight for more recognition for their sport any favors. The fact that there was a four-week break between the competition in Oslo and the previous World Cup in Otepää, Estonia is also rather suboptimal. Florian Aichinger, the national coach of the German combined women, also thinks so: “Overall, the situation is not easy for us: we always have to deal with weeks of competition breaks after a World Cup weekend.”

There was also a non-competition period in February “associated with an intensive search for snow”. This was finally found in Norway, where they were preparing for the last part of the season in Lillehammer. Jumping was also possible in Oslo on a few days. However, his protégés had to fight with a gastrointestinal virus in the meantime “some energy taken” but didn’t have a long-term impact on the team.

Junior Loh is back on the World Cup team

In addition to the veterans Nathalie Armbruster, Jenny Nowak, Svenja Würth and Maria Gerboth, Ronja Loh will also be at the start at Holmenkollen. The 18-year-old from Klingenthal had secured a permanent starting place in the team thanks to her bronze medal at the Junior World Championships. Aichinger wants to work with these five athletes “attack again” and hopes “to be able to get involved in the fight for the podium places again”.