2025-26 Season Preview
Introduction
After eight months away from Nordic sports we are now flying (with legal suits) into the 2025-26 FIS Ski Jumping World Cup. This is an Olympic season and with all the drama from Trondheim, the general public is about to learn a lot about jumping suit alteration and what an extra seem can do for lift.
Outside of the scandal in Trondheim, 2025 saw Austrian dominiation in the men’s field and utter domination by one individual in the women’s. In the men’s Daniel Tschofenig, Jan Hörl, and Stefan Kraft finished 1-3 in both the Crystal Globe competition and the Four Hills Tournament. However, their performance in the World Cup season did not translate to the World Championships, with zero golds across the three events. On the women’s side Nika Prevc had a historic season, winning the Crystal Globe by a whopping 640 points and both individual events at the World Championships. Already a top-5 women’s ski jumper at the 20 years old, Prevc will hope to repeat that success in the Olympics this season.
In terms of the manipulated suit scandal, both Johann Andre Forfang and Marius Lindvik have been suspended for three months. Given that this takes them until the Olympics in February, they have been left off
The scope of this post is just the individual World Cup season. The Olympics will have their own prediction posts shortly before they come around.
Outside the Races
Schedule
Venues
Here are the venues for this season with the last season they performed there in parentheses (Men/Ladies when both racing there if different otherwise just that gender).
Men/Ladies
- Lillehammer (2025)
- Falun (2015)
- Wisla (2025/2023)
- Klingenthal (2024/2022)
- Engelberg (2025)
- Oberstdorf (2025)
- Garmisch (2025)
- Sapporo (2025)
- Willingen (2025)
- Predazzo (OWG) (2020/2013)
- Lahti (2025)
- Holmenkollen (2025)
- Vikersund (2025)
- Planica (2025/2024)
Men Only
- Ruka (2025)
- Innsbruck (2025)
- Bischofshofen (2025)
- Zakopane (2025)
- Bad Mitterndorf (2024)
Ladies Only
- Villach (2025)
- Ljubno (2025)
- Taizicheng (2025)
- Zao (2025)
- Hinzenbach (2025)
Like Nordic Combined, Ski Jumping does not have a long list of venues where the pros can compete, so most of the venues have been used in the last few seasons. There are a couple of exceptions, however. Falun will be used for the first time since the World Championships in 2015. This is likely in anticipation of Falun hosting the champs again in 2027. Beyond that, it is a bit surprising that the men haven’t competed at Predazzo since 2020 and ladies since 2013 given they have known it to be the Olympic venue for quite some time.
Races
In terms of what’s on the schedule, this is the breakdown:
Men
- Total events: 32
- Normal: 1
- Large: 26
- Flying: 5
Ladies
- Total events: 30
- Normal: 9
- Large: 20
- Flying: 1
Ski jumping schedules are pretty similar year over year. This one is no different on the men’s side. However, the women have more Large Hill competitions and fewer Normal Hill competitions than usual. Perhaps a slow drift towards the same competition as men?