Ski jumping and cross-country skiing perfectly exist as separate types of winter programs. But with the same success lives in the sports space and their symbiosis, nicknamed ski nordic combination or "northern combination" (which is closer to the English name - Nordic Combined).
The history of this sport as an independent discipline began in 1924, when combined skiing became part of the competitive program of the Winter Olympics. Then, however, it had a look different from the modern one. Firstly, the race preceded the jumping part, and did not follow it, as it happens now, and, secondly, the system for determining the winners was somehow vague and tricky.
Everything changed with the arrival of the Norwegian athlete Gunder Gundersen in ski nordic combination. It was as a double fighter that he did not distinguish himself with anything outstanding: on his account there were only two medals of different standards, obtained at the world championships - a silver medal in Falun and a bronze medal in Lahti. Gundersen really started talking about 20 years after his sporting successes, when the Norwegian skier became the head of the Nordic Combined Ski Committee, which was part of the structure of the International Ski Federation.
In 1980, watching the Olympic biathlon tournament as the technical director of the competition, Gundersen thought of a scoring system that clearly and specifically explains what advantage an athlete will receive for the springboard part of the competition (and then the sequence had its current appearance) before the ski race.
The awards in the ski nordic combination were played (then and now) were divided into two types - in the individual competition and in the team championship. In personal disciplines, Gundersen proposed to "transform" one point, received by the jumper on the springboard, into 6, 7 seconds on the track. For team starts, the point gap meant the superiority of the leader - the "kicker" of the relay four - in 5 seconds over the closest pursuer.
Later, the transformation coefficient began to undergo changes. In 2010, at the Vancouver Olympics, the standards were set that are still used: 1 jump point in individual competitions takes 5 seconds of time, and in the team this figure dropped to 1.33 seconds.
The legacy of Gunder Gundersen, who passed away more than 10 years ago, is immortalized in several other sports that use the system in the form of the so-called "pursuit race" - in particular, cross-country skiing and biathlon.
