How to watch Nordic combined at the Winter Olympics: A guide to understanding and appreciating the sport

Nordic combined is the intersection of two extremes. On one side, you’ve got low-key cross-country skiing, a battle of endurance across snow-covered meadows and up-and-down rolling hills in a race that can take hours to complete. On the other side, you’ve got ski jumping, 10 frantic seconds of soaring through the air, measured not only by distance but the style with which you fall.

And the Nordic combined mashes the two together to see what kind of lunatic can do both best.

Winter Olympics competitors will start their day with a refreshing leap from a mountain before a frenzied cross-country ski race that will determine 2018’s medalists. There are three events in the Nordic combined arena this winter — a normal-hill discipline, a large-hill discipline, and a team event that changes the traditional 10K ski into a four-man, 20K race. The staggered start times and frenzied finishes make the Nordic combined an underrated standout in a sea of Olympic events.

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Do you like short bursts of excitement, followed by long, grueling tests of endurance? Nordic combined basically mashes up the most boring and most insane things you can do on skis, then crowns a champion based on the competitors’ guts-to-lung-capacity ratio. First comes the ski jump. Then, survivors are shuttled to a medium-distance cross-county skiing race (10 kilometers for individuals and a 20-kilometer relay race for four-person teams) to burn off the adrenaline created from their controlled fall down a mountain. There’s a lull in the middle, but these events start and end with a bang.

The ski jumping part is judged on two components: distance and style. The distance part is self-explanatory, while style points are awarded for everything from to form to landing and, most importantly, a jumper’s ability to not visibly cry while airborne. There are also points awarded for gate and wind factors to ensure fairness across the board.

The cross-country event is based on the results from the ski jump. The top-ranked jumper gets a head start on the rest of the field. Just how much of a head start depends on how badly he’s beaten his competition -- each point on the ski jump leaderboard equals a four-second advantage. If the man in first place carried a 1 1/2-point lead over his closest competitor, he’d start six seconds ahead of him.

All the racers’ start times are staggered according to their ski jump performance. From there, it’s a race to the finish -- first man across the line wins.

Women’s Nordic combined isn’t an Olympic event. That’s messed up, but it’s a result of ski jumping not being a women’s event until the 2014 Games in Sochi. The inclusion of women’s jumpers has helped clear a space for women in the combined event. The U.S. held its first women’s national championship in 2017 in preparation of the sport’s inclusion in 2022 and beyond.

Make it a throwback and go with Felix Gottwald. The retired Austrian is one of his country’s most decorated athletes with seven medals — including three golds — in the event. Or, if you want to go with a 2018 favorite, German Eric Frenzel and Japan’s Akito Watabe are both likely to wind up on the podium and pay off your fandom. Frenzel, the 2014 normal-hill gold medalist, has won the individual World Cup title five times over the last five years, while Watabe has won the last three World Cup events leading up to the 2018 Games.

It’s skiing, but it’s two skiing events Americans typically don’t care about. The U.S. has only won one gold medal in the event. Bill Demong earned gold on the large hill in 2010.

America rating: One bald eagle (out of five), but ...

This may shock you, but people from Nordic countries LOVE the Nordic combined. Countries from the Scandinavian Peninsula have dominated the sport in the last 92 years. Norway’s 30 medals are more than double the next closest country. Finland, with 14 comes in second. That’s because these countries consist solely of long stretches of snowy fields, and the only way to commute to work is via ski jump.

Scandinavia rating: Five salmiakki (out of five and god what did I just eat, it burns)

SKI JUMPERS ARE NEVER SAFE.