The sports of Nordic combined and ski jumping rarely make international headlines, and when they do, it’s often for controversy. The latest controversy over ski suit tampering led to coaching suspensions and threatened to become one of the storylines at Milano Cortina 2026. That said, for decades, ski jumping didn’t allow women to participate at the Olympic level, in part due to myths that their uterus would fall out. They finally broke through and started competing at the Olympics in 2014.
Nordic combined didn’t have that same scrutiny at the Olympic level because, well, women just weren’t allowed to compete at the Games. When the International Olympic Committee dropped it from the Alpes 2030 Winter Olympics earlier this year, suddenly everyone was talking about the sport.
There may be lessons from Olympic history that can help us understand why some Winter Olympic sports are perpetually on the bottom of popularity rankings or have not learned to innovate enough to stay more relevant.
Nordic combined and ski jumping at the Cortina 1956 Winter Olympics
In our ongoing series about the Cortina 1956 Winter Olympics, we look at the sports of Nordic combined and ski jumping, both of which underwent evolutions at these Games.
These Games featured a brand-new ski jump, the Trampolino Italia. Although no longer in use, you can still see it along the road on the way to Cortina d’Ampezzo:
The remnants of the Trampolino Italia, an innovation in ski jumping towers. Photo: Jill Jaracz
A lot of engineering went into the creation of the jump, and the landing area was a parabola rather than an arc, which stabilized landing pressures for a long distance range.
Nordic combined stands on its own
For Nordic combined, a format change helped the sport stand on its own. Prior to Cortina 1956, Nordic combined athletes participated in the regular ski jump and cross-country skiing events and had their results pulled out, which we learned in our Chamonix 1924 series. In this Games, they were finally pulled out and turned into a separate event – and the skiing portion was cut from 18K to 15 K – which allowed people the opportunity to get to know the sport and its athletes better.
That didn’t mean it was easy for anyone outside of the sport to understand how it worked or how some athletes made it to the podium. Today’s Nordic combined competition format is the Gundersen method, where the ski jumping element is first, and the results of the jump determine the starting order of the cross-country skiing portion, with everyone chasing the leader and the first over the finish line taking the gold.
In 1956, both parts of Nordic combined were points-based, and it was nearly impossible to understand how points were allocated in the cross-country portion. Although skiers were racing against the clock, their times translated to a point system. It led to wild results, including the bronze medal going to an athlete who wasn’t really a factor in either part of the competition.
Ski jumping innovation challenges Norway’s dominance
Ski jumping, which was actually called “special jumping” at these Olympics, had its own technique revolution led by Swiss jumper Andreas Däscher. The results were a perfect example of “innovate or die.”
Däscher developed a technique that was more aerodynamic, with a straighter body and arms backward. This varied from the tried-and-true Norwegian technique that involved bending at the hips, throwing arms forward and keeping skis parallel.
To say that Däscher’s technique was controversial was an understatement. Judges didn’t like it. He got into hot water with the Swiss Ski Association. Norwegians discounted it, and they were the dominant force in ski jumping, with 14 Olympic medals, including six golds, in the first six Winter Olympics (Cortina 1956 was the seventh).
But Däscher stuck to his guns, and several other skiers noted that his technique gave them better results than the Norwegian technique. They adopted it when Norway refused to, and it led to Norway’s downfall in the sport. If there was ever a lesson in “innovate or die,” this is it.
Ski jumping suit controversies were still far in the future. Check out what ski jumpers wore in 1956 (also check out the variations in technique):
Listen to our episode to get the full story on Nordic combined and ski jumping at the Cortina 1956 Winter Olympics, and relive some “Wild West” days of sport!
Sources
Barker, Philip. “Swiss ski jumping pioneer Andreas Däscher dies at 96.” Inside the Games. Aug. 15, 2023. Accessed Jun. 19, 2026.
https://www.insidethegames.biz/articles/dascher-ski-pioneer-dies-at-96
The Guardian. “Attenzione! The 1956 Winter Olympics in Cortina d’Ampezzo – in pictures.” Feb. 1, 2026. Accessed Jun 19, 2026. https://www.theguardian.com/sport/gallery/2026/feb/01/in-pictures-the-first-winter-olympics-in-cortina-dampezzo-1956
Olympedia:
Nordic Combined: https://www.olympedia.org/editions/35/sports/NCB
Nordic Combined, Individual Men 1952: https://www.olympedia.org/results/2210
Nordic Combined, Individual Men 1956: https://www.olympedia.org/results/2217
Ski Jumping: https://www.olympedia.org/event_names/519
Athletes:
https://www.olympedia.org/athletes/85961
https://www.olympedia.org/athletes/97823
https://www.olympedia.org/athletes/85545
https://www.olympedia.org/athletes/99135
https://www.olympedia.org/athletes/85379
https://www.olympedia.org/athletes/86096
https://www.olympedia.org/athletes/87742
https://www.olympedia.org/athletes/87274
Countries: https://www.olympedia.org/countries/GER
Olympic Studies Centre. “Over 125 years of Olympic venues: post-Games use.” OSC Reference Collection. Oct. 23, 2025.
“Ski Jumping at the 1956 Cortina d’Ampezzo VII Giochi olimpici invernali.” YouTube. Ski Jumping at the 1956 Cortina d’Ampezzo VII Giochi olimpici invernali
“Cortina d’Ampezzo.” Ski Jumping Hill Archive. Accessed Jun. 19, 2026. https://www.skisprungschanzen.com/EN/Ski+Jumps/ITA-Italy/Cortina+d%60Ampezzo/0330/
Thies, Henner. “This the incredible, high-flying history of ski jumping.” RedBull.com. Oct. 30, 2025. Accessed Jun. 19, 2026. https://www.redbull.com/us-en/ski-jumping-history#4-a-quantum-leap-thanks-to-science-and-ski-jumping-hills
Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons via Picryl
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TRANSCRIPT
Note: This is an uncorrected machine-generated transcript and may contain errors. Please check its accuracy against the audio. Do not quote from the transcript; use the audio as the record of note.
Cortina 1956: Ski Jumping and Nordic Combined
[00:00:00]
Jill Jaracz: Hello, and welcome to another history episode of Keep the Flame Alive, the podcast for fans of the Olympics and Paralympics. All year long, we are looking at the Cortina d’Ampezzo 1956 Winter Olympics, as it is the 70th anniversary of those games, and this is the games that you all have chosen for us to look back on on our history moments.
I am your host, Jill Jaracz, joined as always by my lovely co-host, Alison Brown. [00:00:30] Alison, hello. Buongiorno.
Alison Brown: Buongiorno. I’m having so much fun getting these stories because you’ve been doing the research on them, so it’s always new to me when you come up with stuff.
And they have been wild.
Jill Jaracz: They, they have been wild.
Alison Brown: And having been to Cortina, it definitely adds something to it that, you know, having seen a lot of the places and seen some of the old, venues. So even if you saw it when you were watching the, [00:01:00] 2026 Olympics, this still gives you that same idea when we say, “Oh, it was at the stadium that was now the curling venue.”
Jill Jaracz: Yes. Exactly. hopefully those of you who have been to Cortina and those of you who watched the games on TV will enjoy seeing some of the, or hearing some of these stories that, uh, bring to light those old games, ’cause man, they were something. All of these old games, you’re like… I, I bet if we looked at LA ’84 today or Montreal 1976, we’d be [00:01:30] like, “What?
W- how did that happen?”
Alison Brown: There’s no discotheque though at Cortina.
Jill Jaracz: No, but I bet there was clubbing somewhere.
Alison Brown: I know. There’s always, there’s always a club for the ladies and the men to get dancing together.
Cortina’s Trampolino Italia
Jill Jaracz: So today we are going to talk ski jumping and Nordic combined, which were two of the smaller events at Cortina 1956.
They both used the famed ski jumping venue, the Trampolino Italian, Italia or Italian Ski Jump. we saw this [00:02:00] venue up close and personal.
Alison Brown: We did.
We drove by it on the bus.
Jill Jaracz: Yes. And, uh, you can still go up and visit it, uh, it’s, located in Zuol, which is about three kilometers south of Cortina, so it was a little bit too much of a hike for us to get to and still make the bus home.
It still exists, but it’s not good enough for international competition anymore. there’s too much n- built up around it because now you need multiple hills. So this area had been used [00:02:30] for ski jumping since 1923, but by the time the games were coming in 1956, it needed a full overhaul.
So organizers built this Trampolino Italia for the Olympics, and as the official report states, quote, “And so like the Arabian Phoenix, the final jump disappeared to rise again more splendid under the sun of the Dolomites.” End quote.
Alison Brown: Oh, this final report is poetic.
Jill Jaracz: So [00:03:00] demolition and construction happened in 1955, and the new jump opened on December 8th, 1955.
Reminder, the Jan- the Olympics started on January 6– 26, so it was open for one and a half months, which we know is not bad for the Italians.
Alison Brown: That’s a lifetime.
Jill Jaracz: Right? So there is a lot of technical information in the official report about this hill, and I just don’t understand all of the physics [00:03:30] around it, which means ski jump hills get put on the list, and maybe we can talk to somebody to help us understand what’s going on there.
But according to the US Olympic Book of 1956, this hill was a tough one to learn and was very different from hills in the United States, and it had seven different possible p- starting points depending on the conditions, and then Nordic combined skiers had a shorter in-run than ski jumpers. [00:04:00] So if you were starting at the lowest start point, you could get up to 23 meters a second by takeoff and expect to have a jump of about 60 meters.
At the highest point, you could go 24 meters per second and jump 75 to 80 meters. The landing was designed to be a parabola, and this was also apparently a big deal, and I don’t fully understand what’s going on here, but the official report said, [00:04:30] “A parabola slows the jumper down less than a straightforward arc.”
And there’s something about the pressure on landing being the same, whether the jump is 30 meters or 72 meters, and that’s pretty moderate pressure, so that’s good. 72 meters was a critical point because that, after that, then your pressure increased very quickly. The takeoff area had a zinc casing with a wood grate over it that held the snow in place.
Happily for the athletes, there [00:05:00] was an elevator to the top, but you could also walk the 146 stairs if you wanted to.
Alison Brown: Let’s not do that.
Cortina 1956: Nordic combined
Jill Jaracz: No. But now we know our venue. Let’s look at Nordic combined. Nordic combined had just one event, the men’s individual. And I don’t even know why I say the men’s ’cause Nordic combined never got women’s in the Olympics at all, unless it comes back.
But the event had undergone change at Oslo 1952 by putting the ski jump first. And then it would have [00:05:30] more change at Ni- Cortina 1956 by changing the cross-country skiing from an 18K to a 15K, and having it as a separate event. And this marked the first time that the two events of Nordic combined were its own thing, instead of either glomming onto cro- ski jumping or glomming onto cross-country.
Alison Brown: That’s right, ’cause I remember when we were talking about, Chamonix, they didn’t know who was racing- Yes … as part of Nordic combined versus who was racing as part of [00:06:00] cross-country, so they couldn’t figure out the medals at first.
Jill Jaracz: Yes. It’s pretty crazy. And, now that it’s got its own thing, that’s the way the event would stay, its own two sports run separately.
And the 15K distance would also stay until 2010, when it got cut to an 10K also confusing was that the events worked on a points system, and competitors earned a point total for the jump [00:06:30] and another point total for the cross country portion, and the person with the most combined points won.
And that was very confusing because they also did not put the scale of how you earned points into the records. So I had no idea. And today’s method is what they call the Gundersen method. I went down a massive rabbit hole on Gundersen and his method, but I couldn’t figure out how difficult it was to win the community around doing his way, which [00:07:00] was you do the ski jump first, the winner of the ski jump starts first in the cross country, and everybody’s trailing them in terms of seconds that got translated from their jump scores.
And the winner is the one who goes across the finish line first in the cross country ski. That makes a lot of sense. This is a we get points, and we add those points together, and we get a winner from that.
Alison Brown: So you really don’t know who’s won until everyone’s completed the cross country.
Jill Jaracz: Yeah, [00:07:30] really. Nordic combined has a reputation for being a sport that doesn’t have a lot of regional representation, as we have heard this year from the International Olympic Committee.
32 countries participated at Cortina 1956, the whole games. Just 12 were in Nordic combined. At the previous Olympics in Oslo, the first eight places went to Norwegians or Finns.
Alison Brown: Shocking.
Jill Jaracz: Yes. But, Cortina [00:08:00] 1956 had the potential to make a difference in the sport. Several of the big names in the sport had retired from competition before these games, and we had the arrival of the Soviets.
So we could have- Oh, yes … some new representation on that m- that podium. the jumping portion was first up. This took place on Sunday, January 29th at 2:30 in the afternoon. Weather conditions were reported as unsettled, but the snow was compact and good, temperatures ranged from minus 8.2 Celsius to point, [00:08:30] minus .7 Celsius, so about 17 degrees Fahrenheit to almost 31 degrees Fahrenheit. One of the favorites from the last world championships was Norway’s Sven, , Stenersen. He had a horrible first jump of 65 meters that put him into 19th place- Oh no, Sven … but he made up for it with his… Yes. Second two jumps were 73 meters and 74 meters respectively, and the landings were solid.
Alison Brown: Oh, good news for Sven.
Jill Jaracz: Even with [00:09:00] dropping his low score, which you could do with three jumps, , he was in second place after the jumping portion.
Sweden’s Bengt Eriksson was in third place. And on top of the leaderboard, an unknown from the Soviet Union, Yuri Moskin. Yuri had the longest jump of the competition at 79.5 meters, but he botched the landing with a fall. Oh. Still his, his other two jumps were both over 75 meters with good landings, so he was in [00:09:30] first at the end of the day.
The only other competitors to have jumps in the range of Moskin’s were Poland’s Alexander Kowalski and Japan’s Hiroshi Yoshizawa, who were tied for fifth.
Alison Brown: Yeah, I was wondering if we are yet seeing, the Japanese play a factor here, so it’s nice to hear them because they still, in, in both ski jumping and Nordic combined, you know, outside of the Nordic countries, Japan has always been one of the big players, and Poland for that matter-
for ski jumping as well.
Jill Jaracz: [00:10:00] off the leaderboards are the Finns, who had done extremely well four years prior. They are now sitting in eighth, 17th, and 21st. The other Norwegians were in 10th, 15th, and 26th, which is pretty wild to think that Norway’s got, which has got a, a stranglehold on this event basically, that their skiers are so far down.
And to put those rankings into perspective, American Marvin Crawford, and we all know America is a, [00:10:30] not a hotbed of Nordic combined competition, he was tied for 17th with Finnish athlete Paavo Kohonen. So this is not shaping up to be a Norwegian and Finnish sweep. But two days later, the competitors went to the start line for the cross-country portion.
According to the official report, it was an overcast day with the Dolomites shrouded in mist. Snow was frozen and powdery on the run. And that said, it was kind of [00:11:00] warm. The finish line temperature at the 9:00 a.m.
start time was minus four degrees Celsius.
But It was warmer than the cross country races that they had earlier in the games, and so people were a lot slower here. So if you’re looking for comparisons, we’re slower than cross country. Five kilometers into the race, eight skiers were within a minute of each other. And that includes bib number 33 and 34, Norway’s Sven Stenerksen and Finland’s Paavo Korhonen.
They were tied at 15 minutes 20 seconds. [00:11:30] Korhonen took a surge and, got a 17-second lead at the 10K mark. And that seems to be too much too soon, because then Stenerksen came back and won in a time of 56:18, 14 seconds ahead of Korhonen.
Alison Brown: Oh, he faded.
Jill Jaracz: Yeah, he did fade. And these two were the only ones to finish in less than 57 minutes.
If you had put him in the cross country ski competition, which like you noted, they used to [00:12:00] be, he would’ve been 43rd.
Alison Brown: Oh, wow. They were a lot slower, weren’t they? They
Jill Jaracz: were slower. So we’re, we’re still, still dealing with the point system for the cross country portion, which I could not figure out. Stenerksen’s win, combined with his second place in the jumping, gave him the overall gold.
Alison Brown: Okay. Yay for Sven.
Jill Jaracz: Yuri Moskin, who started last, because he had won the ski jump portion, he completely bonked during the cross [00:12:30] country, took him out of podium contention. He finished 13th.
Alison Brown: Oh, wow.
Jill Jaracz: Yeah. Yeah, they, he went way down. I couldn’t figure out, like, how did you get so few points? Bengt Eriksson, who was third in jumping, tied for 15th in the cross country portion, but he held on for silver overall.
Alison Brown: Oh, this
Jill Jaracz: point system-
Alison Brown: You had this weird- … is very confusing, isn’t it?
Jill Jaracz: Yes. Yeah, so you had this weird, like, people at the top didn’t do well at all in the cross [00:13:00] country portion, so a lot of people rose in the levels just because other people messed up. out of nowhere comes Poland’s Franciszek Gacina-Grohn, who was 10th after the ski jump.
He finished seventh in the ski portion and got the bronze.
Yeah.
Alison Brown: Yeah. I like the system the way they have it now. It’s so much clearer.
Jill Jaracz: Yes. So Grön was originally not even slated to be on Poland’s team. And their [00:13:30] coach threatened to resign if Grön wasn’t put on the roster. So Poland acquiesced. Grön was on the team. Grön got the bronze, Poland’s first Winter Olympics medal and only medal that they earned during these games.
Alison Brown: The coach knew something that the rest of them didn’t, that’s for sure.
Jill Jaracz: Yes. Kowalski, the other Pole who had m- had these massive jumps, he finished 15th. Paavo Korhonen, who’d done so well in the cross country, only got fourth. And the other big jumper, Hiroshi Yoshizawa, did not [00:14:00] finish in the cross country.
He would compete in the ski jump, and I, I believe he’s a non-factor there. so yeah, you’re confused. I’m confused. I apologize for that. It’s a confusing sport at this point in history.
Alison Brown: I mean, it’s a confusing sport now because of just the way the point system for the jumps works and how they stage it with the Gundersen method.
But at least it makes sense where you could say, “Okay, you had a further jump, you get to start first, and we’ve converted those jumps into times, and [00:14:30] everybody gets a staggered start based on how well they jump.”
Jill Jaracz: Yes.
Alison Brown: That makes sense. This is very confusing that you can get seventh and 10th and yet still end up with a bronze medal.
But I guess in comparison to the six people who were ahead of him and the nine people who were ahead of him, he- Yeah … still had the better combination of finishes.
Jill Jaracz: Yeah, that’s just the wild thing. So, final podium, gold goes to Norway’s Sverre Stenersen, asserting Norway’s [00:15:00] dominance in the sport.
Silver to Sweden’s Bengt ” Silver Bengt” Eriksson, who still has Sweden’s best finish in this event. That’s why they called him Silver Bengt. And bronze goes to Poland’s Franciszek Keszenia Grön, who’s still the only Polish medalist in Nordic combined. Stenersen tried to repeat in 1960. He finished seventh.
Eriksson was also at that games. He finished 10th in Nordic combined. He also competed in ski jump but [00:15:30] finished 19th. Grön was not there. He had a big crash while jumping in 1957. He was in a coma for a few days, returned to competition but could never get back to that level. His grandson, Tomasz Pochwała, competed in ski jump at Salt Lake City 2002.
Hmm.
Cortina 1956: Ski jumping
moving over to ski jumping, that was the final event of Cortina 1956, held on Sunday morning at 11:00 AM, the last day of the games. At this time, the [00:16:00] event was called special jumping. And I don’t understand why. and that also confused me when I was reading the official reports ’cause they’d be like, “Special jumping.”
I’m like, “Well, what’s special about it? You have one hill, and why don’t you call it ski jumping at this point?” But that’s the way it was. we just have the large hill individual event. The normal hill that we have today is, it comes in in 1964, so we’re still a little bit a ways from expanding this, sport.
Norway’s [00:16:30] had a stranglehold on the medal count ever since the Winter Olympics began in 1924. We’re on Winter Olympics number seven. Norway has six golds, five silvers, three bronzes.
Alison Brown: Nice collection.
Jill Jaracz: Beautiful day for this event. Clear skies, compact snow. It’s, minus 15.8 Celsius at the start of competition, which is about four degrees Fahrenheit or so, and it gets up to minus four degrees [00:17:00] Celsius, so we’re getting close to, like, 40 degrees at this point.
It’s a huge shift in temperatures. There’s some fabulous footage of this event that I’m gonna try to put on our website. which is flamealivepod.com. You know how this year in 2026 there was that potential controversy over the ski jumping suits?
Alison Brown: Yes.
Jill Jaracz: So we are nowhere near ski suits when it comes to this sport.
Competitors are wearing sweaters. Some of them look like they’re wearing collared shirts [00:17:30] underneath the sweaters.
Alison Brown: They’re not doing the aerodynamics that we have today.
Jill Jaracz: No. No, no, no, no, no. Pants tucked into footwear. They’re billowing around everywhere. Many wore winter hats with pom-poms on them. It’s fantastic.
Alison Brown: As you should. Yeah, we don’t need no helmets. We don’t need helmets. We’re fine.
Jill Jaracz: So the starting point of the hill was an issue. there just wasn’t a great place to prepare for your jump. So the solution [00:18:00] was that at the start, jumpers had to hang onto a chain with their skis perpendicular to the downward slope of the hill, and then when it was time for them to jump, they would like hop, turn their skis around so they’re pointing down the hill, and go.
Let go of the chain. Right? like, today there are built-in tracks, and we’ve understood that there’s ice in those tracks, and today it, it– Then it looked like this was just all snow on the surface of the hill. [00:18:30] technique is also all over the place, and you can see that in the same footage.
And you can tell we’re at a period of transition in the sport, and some technique is, um,
Norwegian, which you would see from Chamonix 1924. You kind of bend at the waist and you lean forward, so it’s not very aerodynamic at all. You have to keep your skis parallel. But other people are following the technique of a Swiss jumper, [00:19:00] Andreas Descher, which was keeping your body more straight as you lean and your arms back.
This made you more aerodynamic. You could fly further. And Descher had developed this technique by working with an aircraft engineer and testing it in a wind tunnel. And- That’s
Alison Brown: very modern.
Jill Jaracz: It, it is very modern, and there is a whole rabbit hole to go down if you would like to, because this innovation was not looked on kindly by judges at the time.
And Descher even [00:19:30] got into hot water with the Swiss Ski Association because of it. They did not like this change at all. this was Swiss so not the tried and true Norwegian technique, and we all know the Norwegians are dominant in this sport. They were the ones who were slow to evolve. The Finns and the Germans were not.
They were like, “Oh, this technique looks pretty good. We will try it.” Also, excited about the new technique was Soviet jumper Koba Tsotadze, who got so flat [00:20:00] when he jumped that his body almost touched his skis
Alison Brown: That’s very modern.
Jill Jaracz: So in the first of two jumps in the competition, those using the new style of jumping excelled.
First place we have Harry Glass from Germany, who jumped 83.5 meters, excellent landing. A half a point behind him was Aulis Kyllökorpi from Finland, and tied for third were Antti Hyvärinen from Finland and Max Bolkart from Germany. pioneer Andreas [00:20:30] Descher is in sixth place, and Tsikadze from, uh, Soviet Union is in eighth.
I wanna take a, a minute and talk about Germany in these games. In 1956, Germany was split into two countries, East and West, and this is a headache for the IOC, which did not like the political aspect of the situ- situation. They wanted one Germany, and they got it in 1952, but those unified teams in 1952 only had West German athletes on them.[00:21:00]
So in 1956, we had another unified team, so we still have one Germany. this time it’s got athletes from both countries, and they compete as one Germany through the 1968 games, and at the IOC session ahead of Mexico City 1968, the IOC voted to allow East Germany and West Germany to compete as their own nations starting in 1972.
So it’s kinda weird, Max Bolkart, who is tied for third after round one, he’s [00:21:30] from West Germany. Harry Glass, who is our leader, is from East Germany.
Alison Brown: I’m surprised Germany put up with it for that long, the two Germanys-
Jill Jaracz: Right …
Alison Brown: put up with being forced to compete together until 1968.
Jill Jaracz: Yeah, it’s a good question why that happened or, you know, what was going on behind closed doors-
Alison Brown: Right
Jill Jaracz: of this situation. in the second round of jumps, Hyvärinen, who had been tied for third, got the longest jump of the day at [00:22:00] 84 meters, also got the highest style points of the day. The Soviet fell. He’s out of contention at this point, even though he has amazing technique. Bad day at the, at the jumping hill for him.
Glass and Kyllökorpi, who had been one and two, they both jumped 85– 80.5 meters, over three meters behind. Kyllökorpi got better style points, but those jumps were both, short enough and put them into jeopardy in terms of staying on the podium. Descher equaled the [00:22:30] distance of his first jump, but he had a better landing.
He got high style points for that. He tied for second best jump of the round, but the way the points fell, he was in sixth place. Wasn’t enough. Kalakorpi and Glass stayed on the podium. So final results are gold goes to Finland’s Antti Hyvarinen in his second and final Olympics. Silver goes to Finland’s Olli Kalakorpi in his only Olympic appearance.
Bronze goes to Germany’s [00:23:00] Harry Glass, also his only games, and he is the first East German to win an Olympic medal. Norwegian would not crack the top 10.
Alison Brown: Wow.
Jill Jaracz: And this Olympics was a definite changing of the guard. In ski jumping since 1956, Norway has won just eight medals in this individual event, and just two of those have been gold.
Alison Brown: So they went from dominating to just being an [00:23:30] also-ran.
Jill Jaracz: Yes. And that’s because they didn’t wanna innovate.
Alison Brown: Norway, you gotta get in on the new game.
Jill Jaracz: So sources, we have, Philip Barker from Inside the Games, The Guardian, Olympia, the Olympic Studies Center, Some film clips from YouTube of the, uh, ski jumping at 1956. Cortina, uh, the Ski Jumping Hill Archive, And Henner Tise write- writing for [00:24:00] redbull.com. So yeah. Two tiny sports- And your
Alison Brown: favorite
Jill Jaracz: Oh my– Oh yes, my favorite, the official report of the Cortina 1956 Olympics. So yeah, two tiny sports.
Alison Brown: That taste great together.
Jill Jaracz: Yeah, they do. They do. Well, not s- not anymore. Not anymore.
Alison Brown: I know.
No more Nordic combined, so all those kids are gonna have to make a choice.
Jill Jaracz: Yeah, and it’s interesting that, uh, I mean, people that I’ve [00:24:30] seen online go, “But it’s one of the original sports. It’s one of the original sports.” But it always seems to have had a problem with having very little regional representation.
Japan slides in there, but the dominance by Scandinavia is just kind of…
It wasn’t bad to begin with because the games were so small, but as the games have been tried to be more global in nature, I think that’s just hurt it as a sport.
Alison Brown: Yeah. Agreed. [00:25:00] Well, I’m sad to see it go. I hope they’re able to bring it back with more representation-
to get more expansion. Though once it’s out of the games, I think getting back in is going to be extremely difficult.
Jill Jaracz: Right. And when will they– I mean, how many years do they have to prove themselves, and how much, proving do they have to do? And do they have the resources to prove to get back? We’ll see. Maybe this will be one of those, ” Oh, remember when Nordic combined was part of the games?” All right, and on that note, we will call it a show.
Thank you so [00:25:30] much for listening.
Alison Brown: And until next time, keep the flame alive.