2026 Winter Olympics: the Alpine Combined will become a doubles event, the IOC has announced

The oldest Olympic event in alpine skiing, the combined will become from the 2026 Olympics in Milan a double event uniting a downhill and a slalom, the International Olympic Committee announced on Tuesday (IOC). "This time it will be a combined team with two specialists, one of the speed events and the other of the technical events", rather than the same skier demonstrating his versatility by chaining the two races, explained to the press Kit McConnell, IOC Sports Director.

The Olympic body thus endorses the proposal of the International Ski Federation, which “will adopt the same format in its own events (…) in the coming seasons, before the Games”, specified the person in charge. This modification changes the very nature of the alpine combined, invented in 1932 by the Swiss of Wengen to decide between the aces of speed and the virtuosos of the stakes, and the first alpine event to enter the Olympic Games four years later in Garmisch-Partenkirchen.

But if there remains a unique spectacle in the white circus, by sending the same competitors on slats of 2.15 m then 1.60 m, the combination proves to be restrictive for the organizers, difficult to read for the general public. , and obsolete in the face of increasing specialization at high level, with a plummeting number of entrants.

It has therefore disappeared from the World Cup calendar since 2020, on the pretext of separating speed and technique specialists in times of a pandemic, leaving only the world championships and the Games to measure themselves against. Adorned with gold at the 2022 Beijing Olympics, the Austrian Johannes Strolz and the Swiss Michelle Gisin will therefore remain the last all-rounders crowned individually, while the Frenchman Alexis Pinturault and the Italian Federica Brignone will be the last world champions with the historical formula.