Annika Malacinski and her brother, Niklas, have both competed at the highest level in Nordic combined, a sport that merges cross-country skiing and ski jumping. This February, Niklas will be competing at the Winter Olympics in Italy, while Annika won’t be able to — this isn’t due to her ability, but her gender.
There is currently no women’s division for Nordic combined at the Winter Olympics, and Malacinski is among several athletes who, this year, won’t be able to achieve their Olympic dream because of blatant sexism.
Malacinski took to social media to share her frustration, and her posts have received overwhelming response and thousands of likes. This has led to comments being left under the Olympics’ official social media pages — TikTok videos have received frustrated comments urging the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to introduce a women’s division for Nordic combined.
The IOC made this decision in 2022, and justified it by claiming the sport lacked universality and suffered from low viewership. However, a recent study finds that viewership of women’s Nordic combined grew by 25 per cent over the 2024/2025 season, and the total audience for the sport grew by 14 per cent. Despite this, the IOC continues to block women from the Olympic stage. Why are women still paying the price for a decision made four years ago about a sport that continues to evolve today? The IOC also clearly disregards the fact that having women compete could contribute to growing interest in the sport — are the Olympics not a chance for general audiences to discover new sports anyway?
This isn’t the only winter sport to suffer from this level of exclusion at the Olympics: ski jumping, for example, only introduced a women’s division in 2014. How can the pinnacle of athletic competition and one of the world’s most highly regarded sporting events be so behind in something as simple as inclusion? The IOC preaches a culture of diversity when in reality, it continues to exclude women who are just as deserving of competition as their male counterparts.
I had the privilege to grow up in environments that supported girls in sport, and was able to participate in whatever sport I liked. It is disquieting and heartbreaking to see that the same can’t be said for Olympic-level athletes, and that even in 2026, women are still fighting for their place in sport.
“2026-01-17 FIS Nordic Combined World Cup Oberhof 2026 – Women’s Individual Compact by Sandro Halank–139” by Sandro Halank, Wikimedia Commons is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.