Gunder Gundersen

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Medal record
Men's nordic combined
World Championships
Silver 1954 Falun Individual
Bronze 1958 Lahti Individual

Gunder Gundersen (September 12, 1930 — June 2, 2005) was a Norwegian nordic combined skier and sports official. During his active career he won two individual FIS Nordic World Ski Championships medals (1954: silver, 1958: bronze) and the Holmenkollen ski festival three times (1952, 1959 (shared with Sverre Stenersen, and 1960).

Gundersen was also the Technical Director of the nordic combined individual event at the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, New York. He finished 11th in the nordic bined event at the 1960 Winter Olympics in Squaw Valley.

His most significant impact on nordic combined was creating the "Gundersen method", in use since 1985. This method recalculated the ski jumping points into cross country skiing start times with the athletes then starting at staggered times with the winning ski jumper starting first. For the 15 km individual and the 7.5 km sprint, the difference between the competitors at the start of the cross country portion of the event was one ski jumping point equaling four seconds. For the 4 x 5 km team event, one ski jumping point equaled 3 seconds, but this was changed in 1995 to one point equaling 1.5 seconds, then again in 2005 to one point equaling one second.

Gundersen received the Holmenkollen medal in 1959.

[edit] References

Preceded by
Inger Bjørnbakken & Håkon Brusveen		 Holmenkollen medal
1959		 Succeeded by
Helmut Recknagel, Sixten Jernberg, Sverre Stensheim, & Tormod Knutsen