The Norwegians “solved” Speed & Style on the 19th century

[drajshe]

One of the weirder things about me is the amount of sports I consume. I do not like 99% of TV shows, just great movies (those are rare) and sports for me… but I am not a big leagues kind of guy. Not much soccer and football, barely any ice hockey plus no basketball and baseball except for weird stuff Instagram sends my way. I do consume a lot of motorsports, a lot of almost every kind cycling and so much winter sports that you would think I am Scandinavian or from the Alps and not living 15 minutes from the beach. All this plus my stupid brain allows me to compare all sorts of aspects of any sport I watch. Nothing is new and, even when speed & style was created, the whole thing of combining jumping well and going fast into a single sport is so old that maybe the best way to do it was created in the 19th century.

I am talking about this little Norwegian creation known as the nordic combined. In it, a single athlete has to be able to be thing enough to fly in ski jumping but also have the all-around body strength and stamina needed for cross-country skiing. Even nowadays, over 130 years after the 1st recorded event and almost 100 years since it first appeared in the Winter Olympic Games, the “perfect athlete” does not really exist because both body types are mostly incompatible. Either you’re a lousy glider or a slow skater.

How does nordic combined work? You got 2 main ways to do it:
· Jump first, then each point you’re behind the leader gets transformed into seconds you’ll be lagging behind in a pursuit-style race
· Race first, then each second you’re behind the race winner gets transformed into negative points you need to compensate on your jump

The whole problem with speed & style for many was that it was ghost racing. A pass on the track could be 100% meaningless because the points could make it entirely irrelevant, it was all too relative. Nordic combined’s competition format solves this completely. All you need to do is to make the competition happen in 2 halves. You could even make it extra fun by forcing riders into using just one motorbike for both parts so even the bike plays a role on how much you lean to one part or the other. Plus, due to this format, you could also have guys banging bars. No more 1v1 thing, we could have 6-8-12-20 guys on track at once.

IDK who to contact but Red Bull needs to try this out.

PS: One day I’ll tell you how freaking figure skating managed to give a concrete value to every trick possible (with modifiers in case the trick was done perfectly or poorly) yet FMX can’t figure it out somehow.

• This topic was modified 1 year ago by drajshe.

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