Steamboat Springs produces many elite Nordic Combined athletes. But the women can only fly so high
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STEAMBOAT SPRINGS, Colo. — It’s a chilly December night at the top of Howelsen Hill in Steamboat Springs. A crisp whistle cuts through the silence on the mountain. Sixteen-year-old Ella Wilson now knows it’s time to start her ski jump.
She races down the hill’s in-run, going up to sixty miles per hour before, WHOOSH! She flies off the ramp and hits the landing hill hundreds of feet below. She only gets to do a few repetitions, so she’s treating each jump like it’s the real thing. She shares her thoughts with her coach through a walkie talkie.
“Jumped with a low line,” she said. “This one, I'm gonna think jumping up with a higher line.”
Wilson is practicing for a Nordic Combined competition — a sport that combines ski jumping with cross-country skiing. She’ll not only fly more than the length of a football field off a 90-meter hill, but she will also need endurance to do a cross-country race — more than three miles on land.
“That’s what it takes, you have to be a little bit crazy to do the sport,” Wilson said. “But getting into the air is honestly the best feeling I've ever felt.”
Wilson is one of seven people — and two women — on the USA Nordic Combined Developmental Team. Her other female teammate, Haley Brabec, got started in the sport when she was only five years old.
“Growing up in Steamboat as a kid, when you learned to walk, they were putting you on skis,” Brabec said.
Wilson has a slightly different story of how she started in the sport. Her dad, Todd Wilson, competed in Nordic Combined. He helped expose her to it at a young age.
“Once I was born, he would carry me in the front pack down the landing hill,” she said. “So you could say I've been doing it since (I was) a baby.”
Todd Wilson competed at the 1988 and 1992 Winter Olympics in the sport. More than 20 local athletes have also made it to the Olympics in Nordic Combined.
But Ella can’t follow in her dad’s footsteps. While the sport debuted more than 100 years ago, it's the only Olympic winter sport where women can’t compete. It has been mandatory to add women to every Olympic sport since the 1990s, but any sport added before then can exclude them.
“They don't really have any love for us, passion for us, and support for us, which is unfortunate, but we are trying to win them over,” she said.
Advocates for the sport have long been fighting to add women to the Olympics. In 2022, they were hopeful it would happen for the next Winter Games in 2026. But the International Olympic Committee said no due to low viewership and lack of diverse countries on the podium.
Brabec said there are other sports that are not watched as much or have the same country winning year after year that still allow women to compete.
“There's just this unfairness and we don't really know why it's there,” she said.
Katie Adams with Steamboat’s Tread of Pioneers Museum said she believes there’s another concept at play — “misogyny.”
“It was sort of a widespread belief that women were not equipped physically to handle the demands of both disciplines,” Adams said. “They assumed they would get hurt, that it wouldn't go well for them, I guess is the misunderstanding.”
But in Steamboat Springs, women have been skiing for over a century, thanks to the inspiration of Carl Howelsen. Before his arrival, Steamboat residents mainly used skis and snowshoes to check on cattle or carry mail. But in 1913, Howelsen came to town after doing a ski jumping show for the Barnum and Bailey Circus, looking for bigger hills.
“So I think it was a really exciting time, kind of moving winter from like a desolate, cold endeavor to more of a recreational, fun experience,” she said.
Howelsen got to work cutting up trees and constructing some jumps. Soon after, he hosted a ski jumping expedition. Thousands of people came to watch him jump, and the town became obsessed. Later in 1947, there was a photo in the Associated Press captioned, “The population of Steamboat Springs, Colorado is 1,700. The number of persons who skis is reported to be 1,685. The others are children under one year of age.”
“It's been said that Nordic Combined is to Steamboat Springs as football is to Texas,” she said.
It wasn’t long after Howelsen that Ted Farwell came to Steamboat Springs to train for the Olympics for Nordic Combined. He placed 11th in the 1952 Olympic Games in Norway. And then in 2002, Steamboat residents Todd Lodwick and Johnny Spillane just missed the podium with the U.S. men’s team at the Salt Lake City Olympics. Then, In 2010, Lodwick and Spillane took home a silver medal in the team event.
Today, more than 360 kids on average train at Howelsen Hill across all disciplines every weeknight, according to officials from the Steamboat Springs Winter Sports Club. It’s one of only 30 ski clubs in the United States, and it’s the only one in Colorado and the Rocky Mountain region. Some kids have even become so good that they’re on the national team.
That’s the case for Steamboat resident Annika Malacinski, and her brother, Niklas. They’re some of the top American Nordic Combined athletes in the world. She believes women are just as capable of excelling as men.
“Me and Niklas go out and do the same exact training,” she said. “We push ourselves to the limit as well, like we should have the right to compete at a high level, we want to have the same rights as the men have. And it was really a slap in the face when they made that decision.”
Malacinski was crushed when she heard the news from the International Olympic Committee. She was flying back home from a training camp in Europe and bought Wi-Fi on the plane to listen to the decision. She said once she heard it, she couldn’t stop crying for the eight hours left of her flight.
“I had very intrusive thoughts, thinking like, ‘Why am I doing this? Do I switch sports? Do I quit?’” she said. “I was just disgusted by the situation, about the decision, about how they even handled it, how they talked about it.”
The committee marketed the 2026 Winter Olympics as the most gender-equal in history, but still kept women out of Nordic Combined. The committee also said there needs to be “significant positive development” to keep men in the sport for 2030, or it will be cut altogether.
“Their idea behind making it an equal sport is to take out an Olympic original sport,” Niklas Malacinski said. “It just seems absurd and almost laughable, as if it's a joke, but then you realize it's the reality.”
Despite Annika and Niklas’ high rankings, she said many people’s eyes don’t light up unless you say the word “Olympics.” That’s when she realized there’s so much more to the sport than one competition every four years.
“You're doing it because you love it,” she said. “You love the journey, you love the people around it. You wanna push yourself to the limits.”
Back at Howelsen Hill, it’s the first competition of the season. Ella Wilson and Haley Brabec get on the poma lift as the announcer's voice booms through the speakers. They’re starting with ski jumping. Wilson, wearing a highlighter yellow suit, is ready to race.
“84.5 meters for Ella Wilson!” the announcer shouts as Wilson hits the landing hill. “That’s how you do it. What an inspiration.”
After completing the cross-country portion, Wilson ended up finishing first in the competition. She’s a rising star in the sport – she was the first woman to win the Jumpin' and Jammin' contest in Steamboat in July, and she has competed in the Junior World Championships. Even though women will not be at the Olympics next year, she’ll keep competing – for herself and others.
“It feels like a duty, like we have to stay in it for the little girls,” she said. “We have to stay in it for the future of our sport.”
The IOC needs to determine if Nordic Combined will be canceled entirely for the 2030 Olympics due to low viewership. That decision is expected this summer. If the sport is kept, the IOC will discuss if women will be allowed to participate in the summer of 2026, according to officials from the International Ski and Snowboard Foundation.
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