Members of the Swiss contingent climbed the steps near the Springer Haus on the second of three scheduled days of competition in the Sanford Health Marshfield Clinic FIS Continental Cup meet Saturday, February 21, 2026, at the Pine Mountain Ski Jump in Iron Mountain, Michigan. The day’s activities were canceled due to inclement weather.

IRON MOUNTAIN — For the first time in 23 years, the Kiwanis Ski Club in Iron Mountain, lost its entire weekend of ski jumping at Giant Pine Mountain due to the weather — and the sport’s governing body lost one of its favorite events on the International Continental Cup circuit.

“It’s always a highlight to be here in Iron Mountain with the crowds, with the people here, organizers doing a fantastic job,” FIS coordinator Berni Schoedler said after the announcement of the cancellation of Sunday’s competition. “Of course, everyone is a little bit sad, but it was so clear we cannot do ski jumping with six, seven meters of wind (about 15 mph). This is just too dangerous. At the end, everyone also likes to be safe.”

The decision to cancel the final day’s activities — ending the Sanford Health Marshfield Clinic FIS Continental Cup meet that was to have been four competitions over three days — came before 10 a.m. Sunday. The handwriting was on the wall after Friday and Saturday jumps were canceled and the Sunday forecast called for more of the same. Training jumps Thursday were the only action on the slide.

“Very, very frustrating,” Kiwanis Ski Club president Nick Blagec said Sunday. “We spent a year on this thing, and the last couple months, it’s just an immense amount of work that we went through to get this thing going. It’s disappointing … just wind all weekend.”

The event has lost individual days due to weather problems but not a complete tournament since 2003. The 2021 tournament was wiped out by the COVID-19 pandemic.

“This is about one of the worst winters I’ve seen as far as the whole winter,” Blagec said. “And then last weekend it would have been perfect, but we’ve got to pick our date in April and we’ve got to stay away from the Super Bowl and some other (activities). We just hit the wrong weekend.

“Last year, we had four days of just beautiful weather. And the year before that, we had three days of beautiful weather. It’s a winter sport. This is what happens.”

While the loss of the tournament was frustrating for organizers and fans, at least it did not put the club in financial straits the way 2021 did. Sponsorships ranging from $250 to $35,000, paid tailgating and parking spots and most admission buttons were purchased well in advance. “Just from preliminary stuff, I think we’re going to be pretty well set,” Blagec said.

Still, the club has debt to pay for the 2020 construction of the 176-foot steel tower that replaced the wooden structure and is trying to get an elevator installed that would allow the jump to generate tourism income year-round. “We need the elevator, and I was kind of pulling legs yesterday quite a bit,” Blagec said of lobbying the politicians on the grounds Saturday for help. “I hope we get that, because we use it all year round, not just for ski jumping.”

On Saturday, traditionally the biggest day for the tournament, parking lots were closed by about 11 a.m. and the shuttle lot at Bay College Iron Mountain Campus also was filled, Blagec said. While some attendees were upset with the lack of action on the hill, Dickinson County’s largest winter tailgate party raged on and fans who stuck around until later afternoon seemed to understand the situation. Responses to the club’s Facebook announcement of the Saturday cancellation were not all positive but most were.

In a heartening show of support, one fan from Wisconsin came to the tournament office to purchase a button and even after finding out the competition had been called off decided to spend the $30 for what he considered a good cause. “I went to the jumps about 15 years ago and when I was a kid, because I’ve come up here my entire life,” said Jon Main, a retired orthopedic surgeon from Kenosha, Wis., who has a vacation home near Crystal Falls. He was with relatives, including his elderly mother, who had been an Iron Mountain High School teacher.

“It was curiously easy to get in, so I knew that something (wasn’t right),” Main continued. “And then we were commenting on the velocity of the wind coming in. I said, they’re likely gonna cancel it, considering they canceled it on Friday.”

Skiers made the most of the delays Saturday, gathering for team photos on the end of the slide and chatting with volunteers at the top of the hill. On Sunday, the Kiwanis Ski Club tried to put together a small, cash “bump jump” competition on a small makeshift jump, the sort on which children would learn, but even that had to be scrapped after about a half hour of trying. So more than four dozen jumpers, coaches and trainers headed back to Europe with nothing to show for their efforts.

Iron Mountain was to include two makeup competitions for events canceled elsewhere, but now the FIS has lost two more with only two events remaining on the Continental Cup calendar. “We try everything to have competitions for the athletes, and if you have a super organizer like here, of course, it’s even more exciting,” said Schoedler, a former jumper and Swiss coach. “We tried to have three competitions (Saturday), which would be something completely new, completely special to Iron Mountain. Now we have zero. At the moment, it’s difficult to find hosts which support us that way. So it looks like this is just canceled and see you next year.”