By Mitch Phillips
ZHANGJIAKOU, China (Reuters) – Nordic combined, the sport that involves ski jumping and cross-country skiing, has a long, proud history but only in recent years has it found a way to became spectator and TV-friendly, thanks to the introduction of the “Gundersen method”.
The sport can trace its origins to the 19th century and was included at the first Olympics in 1924, but for decades it struggled to nail down a truly satisfactory scoring system.
For most of its history the athletes took their jump or jumps then raced in a time trial system, across varying distances with various formulas invoked before an official would tot up the scores and emerge some time later to announce the winner.
Norwegian Gunder Gundersen had close-up experience of this during a career that brought him silver and bronze world championship medals in the 1950s and an 11th-placed finish at the 1960 Olympics.
After retiring he moved into administrating the sport and dedicated himself to finding a better scoring system. His inspired idea was to convert the distance gained in the ski jump into times applicable to the cross country, so that the leading jumper goes off first with a headstart on the next-best, and so on through the field.
Those with shorter jumps can make their way through to challenge the longer jumpers, and the end result is that whoever crosses the line first is the winner, and fans watching live and on TV can enjoy the excitement of a proper race.
The system was initially implemented in 1985 and first used at the Olympics in 1988 and though there have been regular tweaks to the relationship between jump distance and cross-country time, the basic concept has remained in place since and events at the Beijing Games bear the name “Gundersen Large hill” etc.
Gundersen died in 2005 at the age of 74 but his legacy has widened since, with his system now adopted by Modern Pentathlon, though an experiment to use it for the decathlon and heptathlon in athletics did not prove popular.
The 2022 Nordic combined programme gets underway in Zhangjiakou on Wednesday with the men’s Gundersen normal hill competition. There are also large hill and team large hill events, but there are no women’s events in the Olympic programme.
(Reporting by Mitch Phillips; Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman)
