Annika Malacinski's emotional fight for women's inclusion in Nordic combined

Annika Malacinski remembers the moment the door to the Milano Cortina 2026 was slammed shut.

On a flight from Munich to Denver, she bought airplane Wi-Fi to join a conference call with the International Olympic Committee, certain that Nordic combined competition would at last be opened up to female athletes.

"Then the decision came: 'no.' No explanation, no discussion. Just 'no,' and then they moved on to the next topic," she told The Associated Press from her training base in Norway.

"I cried for eight hours straight on that flight. When I arrived in Denver, my eyes were swollen shut. It felt like my world had crashed."

That was in June, 2022. And despite an ongoing campaign led by Malacinski, an athlete from Colorado now aged 24, her sport remains the last to exclude women — even as Milano Cortina is showcasing the highest level of female participation in Winter Games history at 47 per cent.

Malacinski is a frequent top-10 finisher at elite competitions in the sport that combines ski jumping and cross-country skiing and demands rigorous year-round training.

Her younger brother, Niklas, will compete in the men's event for the United States and she plans to travel to northern Italy to cheer him on.

"It's bittersweet. I know how hard he works, and he absolutely deserves it," Malacinski said.

"I do the same sport as him. I jump the same ski jumps and ski the same courses. The only difference is that I'm a woman."

Female skiers racing in Seefeld, Austria, last weekend protested the exclusion by raising their poles overhead to form an X.

Men have competed in the Nordic combined since the first Winter Games more than a century ago, at Chamonix, France in 1924.

The sport is now at risk of being removed from the program at