As young Nordic combined athletes, Carter Brubaker and his teammates had a unique pre-competition routine.
“Billy Demong — I’ve watched his races probably 100 times,” Brubaker said. “We would always watch it before Junior Worlds or before a big event. We’d go watch Billy win the gold again and be like, ‘Yeah, that’s gonna be us tomorrow.’”
The race in question is from the 2010 Vancouver Olympics. There, after 86 years without a medal in Nordic combined, the United States finally broke through, claiming four of the nine prizes awarded. After earning silver medals in the individual normal hill and team events, the U.S. was represented on the podium a third time behind Bill Demong’s heroic gold-medal finish in the individual large hill. Teammate Johnny Spillane, who finished second in the normal hill event, crossed the finish line just behind Demong for another silver.
No American athlete has won an Olympic Nordic combined medal since the country’s historic performance in 2010, and in ski jumping, the U.S. drought is even worse. Their last medal came at the inaugural Winter Games in 1924.
So, after the Beijing Games in 2022, the nonprofit then known as USA Nordic Sport (USANS), which oversaw the country’s ski jumping and Nordic combined programs, decided something needed to change.
In August 2022, the organization entered into a formal, four-year-long cooperation with Norwegian ski jumping federation Norges Hopplandslaget. Per the partnership, the two countries share coaches and sports scientists, co-host training camps in both countries, work together to obtain sponsors for the sports and its athletes, and more. Additionally, the arrangement gives American athletes the chance to live and train in Norway throughout the winter season.
Brubaker moved to Lillehammer, Norway, at just 16 years old, two years before the official cooperation began. A year later, ski jumper Tate Frantz did the same. The two young athletes enrolled at NTG Lillehammer, a sports-focused high school which offers students the opportunity to train in the athletic facilities built for the 1994 Winter Olympics.
Frantz, who originally trained in Nordic combined, grew up in Lake Placid, New York, where he had access to Olympic training facilities. In Brubaker’s hometown of Anchorage, Alaska, however, the resources were much more limited. Neither athlete had many peers to train with. Additionally, most international competitions for both sports are held in Europe, imposing a heavy financial and physical burden on American athletes who had to travel back and forth during the winter season.
The decision was a daunting one, to say the least; to move to a foreign country alone — especially one which speaks a completely different language — would be ambitious for an adult, let alone a teenager.
“It was definitely a bit of a gamble going there at first because there weren’t any other Americans over there at the time,” Brubaker said.
But both young athletes understood it was a necessary risk to take if they wanted to become serious contenders in their respective sports.
“[Norway has] resources that I never saw when I was training in Lake Placid,” Frantz said. “It comes down to the training plans and the testing we’re able to do ... The combination of all that is something that is super important, and it’s a side of the sport that not a lot of people see: the fine tuning.”
In the years leading up to Beijing, the U.S. ski jumping program used Slovenia as its home base. American athletes spent up to 11 months each year living and training there, and they worked with Slovenian coaches. Though the country’s Nordic combined program primarily trained in the United States with a U.S.-based coaching staff, it also spent some time each season using the facilities in Austria and Slovenia.
But Norway, which created both ski jumping and Nordic combined, is (and always has been) a winter sports giant across the board. Through the Beijing Games, the Scandinavian nation has collected a world-leading 405 medals. It also tops the medal count in a quarter of the disciplines currently on the Olympic program, including ski jumping (36) and Nordic combined (35).
American athletes in Norway have access to a wealth of cutting-edge technology and specialists dedicated to arranging each tiny piece of the puzzle: force plates which measure balance and power, technicians who specialize in different types of ski wax, cameras which record and analyze jumps from multiple angles, tailors who fix torn or malfunctioned suits, artificial intelligence systems which identify weak spots and create specialized training plans accordingly, and more — not to mention the expertise of the highly-decorated Norwegian athletes training around them.
“The main reason I initially came over here was just the training group and peers ... Being surrounded by like-minded people gets you going,” Frantz said. “Most of the staff on our team are former ski jumpers themselves, some of whom held world records, Olympic medals, etc. Just having those guys on our side that have so much experience with what we’re trying to achieve, I think, is really, really helpful.”
The United States’ Nordic combined success in Vancouver wasn’t a fluke limited to the Olympic stage. At world championships the year before, Americans took gold in three of the four contested events. On the 2007-08 World Cup circuit, Demong became the first American to finish in the top-three overall — a feat he achieved again the following season. Todd Lodwick, who was on the United States’ relay squad that secured silver at the 2010 Olympics, climbed into the top 10 for eight consecutive years between the 1997-98 and 2004-05 seasons.
U.S. ski jumpers earned improved results, too. During the 2011-12 World Cup season — the first which included a women’s ski jumping competition — the United States’ Sarah Hendrickson topped the World Cup podium, and Lindsey Van placed fifth. Hendricks finished second the following campaign. Over the same two seasons, the American women won consecutive Nations Cups.
The reason for the sudden boom? In short, money.
In the mid-1990s, ahead of the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City, winter sports federations across the country felt a pressure to improve their skill in an attempt to become stiffer competition for Norway. For the ensuing decade-plus, the United States Ski and Snowboard Association poured resources into all of its programs, including Nordic combined and ski jumping, and did so consistently.
Both ski jumping and Nordic combined demand that kind of dedication. Ski jumping is an incredibly technical sport which requires athletes to maintain perfect form through every portion of the jump in an attempt to defy gravity. Nordic combined, a unique sport which blends ski jumping and cross-country skiing, often takes a decade or more to master given the contradictory skills each discipline involves.
Eventually, due to the economic crisis of the early 2000s, those resources dwindled.
No U.S. man has cracked the World Cup top 10 in Nordic combined since Spillane’s ninth-place finish during the 2009-10 season (American women Tara Geraghty-Moats and Alexa Brabec each have accomplished the same feat once since the women’s competition made its World Cup debut in 2021, but currently, Nordic combined is the only Olympic sport which does not include a women’s competition). No American ski jumper, man or woman, has done it since Hendrickson and Nita Englund in 2015.
“Right now, we’re stuck in this snowball effect,” Frantz said. “In order to get more funding, you need good results, but in order to get good results, you need more funding.”
But they’re getting closer, thanks to the resources available in Norway.
Last ski jumping World Cup season, Frantz placed 22nd overall, collecting the most World Cup points in a single season of any U.S. man ever. Jumper Kevin Bickner — who retired from the sport in 2022 and returned to competition once he saw the results the cooperation produced — finished not too far behind in 28th, his personal best. With her 29th-place finish, Annika Belshaw became the first American woman jumper to break into the top 30 since 2017. The U.S. men also finished 8th in the Nations Cup, their best since the 1984-85 season.
Three of the four members of the men’s Nordic combined team have shot up in World Cup rankings. In 2023, one year into the partnership with Norway, Niklas Malacinski (52nd), Ben Loomis (46th) and Stephen Schumann (50th) all placed under the top 45. By the end of the 2024 campaign, they climbed to 25th, 27th and 30th, respectively. It was the first time since 2018 that an American man finished in the top 30.
Brubaker, who competed within the Continental Cup (the second-tier international competition circuit) until last season, rose from 76th place in 2024 to 30th in 2025.
Americans aren’t the only ones taking advantage of Norway’s expertise. Estonian Nordic combined athlete Kristjan Ilves has trained in Norway since 2019. Over the last six years, Ilves improved from a 54th-place finish in the World Cup to fifth — a feat he accomplished thrice between 2022 and 2024.
Jill Brabec, president of Nordic Combined USA and Alexa Brabec’s mother, stated, “You want to go, ‘What’s the magic here that’s happening?’ But I think it’s not just one thing. It’s not that somebody comes in and has the magic word. It’s being part of a strong system.”
In June 2024, USA Nordic sport decided to pull funding from the Nordic combined program, citing the financial strain the COVID-19 pandemic put on the organization. Now called USA Ski Jumping, it oversees only one sport.
As a group of athletes, parents and other supporters frantically organized a new nonprofit called Nordic Combined USA (NCUSA), collecting the resources to finance their own partnership with Norway quickly became a top priority.
“We were seeing success. We were just a year or two in, and our athletes were excited about [the cooperation],” Brabec said. “We were starting to see some gain, and we didn’t want to pull the plug on that because we thought there was a lot to still be gathered from it.”
Thankfully, in November of that year, the International Ski and Snowboard Federation stepped in, awarding NCUSA a development grant meant to fund their cooperation.
Though it may seem counterintuitive to share the secrets it holds, Norway has a huge stake in the cooperation, too. Neither ski jumping nor Nordic combined are widely-practiced sports outside Europe. At the Olympic level, athletes representing European countries have earned 109 of 120 (or 90.8%) of all Nordic combined medals awarded. The figure roughly is the same for ski jumping (90.1%).
In addition, Nordic combined is the only sport on the Olympic program — winter or summer — that doesn’t include a women’s competition. Women’s ski jumping only was added to the Olympics in 2014, and the men’s competition still features one more event than the women’s.
In a continued attempt to achieve full gender parity at the Olympics, the IOC is weighing a big change heading into the 2030 Winter Games: whether to add a women’s Nordic combined competition to the Olympics, or to drop the sport from the Olympic program entirely.
So for Norway, the cooperation is about keeping the sport alive.
“Not many people are doing those sports because they are so difficult,” said Ivar Stuan, Norway’s Nordic combined Sport Director. “We need to make the smaller countries stronger because we need more [competition] to survive.”
Neither country sees the cooperation as a permanent solution. U.S. athletes leave everything behind when they move to Norway — their families, their homes, even their abilities to earn money. Many of the American athletes are on cultural visas, which prevent them from working in Norway. The idea is to bring the resources and expertise back home.
“The long-term goal is not for Norway to always be coaching U.S. athletes. The long-term goal is for Norway to help strengthen our team, to get them to a good place, and then to build that framework so the U.S. can build on it — to get our coaching level and our athletes and our program to a good point,” Brabec said. “A big piece of this isn’t just the athlete’s success, but bringing our development coaches over to Norway, or bringing their coaches here to share information.”
But as they head into another Olympic year, the athletes indescribably are grateful for everything Norway has shared up to this point. For now, both American teams are just happy that this could be the boost they needed to break the medal drought.
"No one really wants to go watch your athletes who are way in the back of the pack. They want to see ... Jessie Diggins on the cross-country side. They want to see Simone Biles and Michael Phelps," Brubaker said. "[We're] trying to get to that level where we're fighting for medals, fighting for podiums, and I think we're really close now."