Lausanne, Switzerland – The format of alpine skiing’s combined event will be changed for the 2026 Winter Olympics, featuring two specialists in a team rather than just one skier, the International Olympic Committee announced Tuesday.
The alpine combined is revered as the event that compensates a skier’s all-round skills, over a downhill or super-G and then a slalom, the winner being the athlete with the fastest aggregate time.
But the combined has recently dropped off the World Cup calendar as fewer skiers train in both speed and technical events, making for small entry lists whenever it is held.
Kit McConnell, the IOC’s sports director, confirmed that the format in the Milan/Cortina Games would involve two skiers.
While that throws up the mouth-watering prospect of a nation’s best downhiller combining with its best slalomer over two races in a bid for gold, it also robs the sport of an event seen as a pure test of polyvalence.
“This time it will be a team combined, with two athletes, two specialists, one in speed events and one in technical events, each doing their speciality and the addition of those two results giving the overall team result for their NOC,” McConnell said after an IOC executive board meeting.
“So two specialists doing the downhill and the slalom rather than an individual athlete. This is the format that FIS (International Ski Federation) will bring in to their own events around the alpine combined, now the team combined, in the coming seasons ahead of the Games.”
The alpine combined event was first staged at the 1936 Winter Olympics in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, but was dropped at the 1952 Oslo Games.
It returned in Calgary in 1988 and has been an ever present since.
Current Olympic champions are Austrian Johannes Strolz and Switzerland’s Michelle Gisin, while France’s Alexis Pinturault and Italy’s Federica Brignone triumphed in the event at this year’s world championships.
