Ruud, Birger

Birger Ruud, (born August 23, 1911, Kongsberg, Norway—died June 13, 1998, Kongsberg), Norwegian ski jumper, who was the only athlete to win both a jumping and a downhill event in the same Olympics.

Raised in the silver mining town of Kongsberg, Ruud and his brother Sigmund became the leading ski jumpers of Norway in the 1930s. Sigmund won the 1927 world championship and, at the 1928 Olympic Games in St. Moritz, Switzerland, he earned a silver medal in the ski jump. These accomplishments were surpassed by his younger brother Birger, who claimed world championship ski-jumping titles in 1931, 1935, and 1937, and earned three Olympic medals in his career.

Birger Ruud won his first Olympic gold medal at the 1932 Olympic Games in Lake Placid, New York, U.S. There he led a medal sweep for Norway in the normal hill ski jump. In front of a crowd that included Chancellor Adolf Hitler, Ruud triumphed again at the 1936 Olympics in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany. He not only repeated as the normal hill ski-jump gold medalist, but he also won the downhill competition (unfortunately for Ruud, medals were not awarded for the downhill race until 1948) and narrowly missed an Alpine combined medal, finishing fourth. World War II forced the cancellation of the 1940 and 1944 Winter Olympics, but 1948 found Ruud at the Olympic Games in St. Moritz, as an assistant coach on the Norwegian ski-jumping team. When the weather turned treacherous the night before the competition, he replaced a younger athlete. Sixteen years after his first Olympics, Ruud won the silver medal.