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| - Norway, the world's leading ski jumping nation, announced Monday that it would merge its men's and women's national teams into a unisex team. The new mixed national team will be smaller with 12 athletes, seven men and five women, and will include male athletes Halvor Egner Granerud and Robert Johansson together with female stars Maren Lundby and Silje Opseth. In practice, athletes have already trained and prepared together, regardless of gender. "The idea behind this is to highlight how we work and how we have achieved the results we have had in recent times together in a community where boys and girls have almost always trained together," the team's director Clas Brede Brathen told a press briefing. Women and men will continue to compete separately. Critics argue that there is still a long way to go for gender equality in the sport as the International Ski Federation (FIS) still does not allow women to take part in ski flying events, a discipline that allows for much longer jumps, to the dismay of athletes such as Lundby, who have been campaigning for this for years. The Norwegian national team, who will compete in 2021-2022, also includes Daniel Andre Tande, who suffered a very heavy fall in Planica in Slovenia in March and was put in an artificial coma for several days. phy/map/jll/jc
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