A Tunnel for the National Team: What It Takes for a Federation to Build Its Own
Most national ski jumping teams still rent tunnel time or share facilities. What it actually takes for a federation to build and run its own.
Right now, most national teams don't own a dedicated flight tunnel. American Nordic Combined athletes travel to a commercial facility in Slovenia on partial grant funding. The United States and Norway recently signed an unprecedented agreement to share coaches and facilities rather than each building separately. FIS itself has run suit research through an automotive wind tunnel rather than a purpose-built sports facility. The current default is renting, sharing or borrowing capacity — which tells you exactly what the honest business case for owning one has to answer: why would a federation build its own, rather than keep doing what everyone else already does?
1. The parameters that actually decide the concept
A federation-grade facility isn't a smaller commercial tunnel — it's specified against the discipline it serves, and the numbers differ meaningfully by sport. A ski jump flight tunnel needs wind speeds and adjustable flight angles matched to actual ski flight conditions — comparable purpose-built facilities run wind speeds in the 145–170 mph range with flight angles adjustable from roughly 14° to 35°. A wingsuit-focused facility runs an entirely different regime — closer to 90–130 km/h with a lower, glide-appropriate incline. Getting this wrong in either direction — over-speccing for a discipline that doesn't need it, or under-speccing for the one that does — either wastes capital or fails to deliver the training value the federation is paying for in the first place.
The starting question isn't "what tunnel do we want." It's "which specific discipline, at what athlete level, needs this facility" — because that answer sets the speed range, the angle range and the chamber geometry before anything else gets decided.
2. The budget question a federation has to answer honestly
The addressable population of elite athletes in most Olympic flight disciplines is small by design — a national ski jumping or Nordic Combined programme trains dozens of athletes, not thousands. A dedicated facility sized only against that population, running only during national team training blocks, has a utilisation problem before it opens. The commercial logic that makes an inclined tunnel work at all — reserving dedicated blocks for federation training while filling the rest of the calendar with other segments — applies just as directly to a federation-built facility as to a commercial one.
That means the honest budget conversation isn't just construction cost. It's a utilisation model: how many hours per week the national team actually needs, and what fills the calendar the rest of the time.
3. Why university and institute partnership is the model that actually works
A federation rarely has the standalone case to justify full-time ownership of a facility built for one discipline and one small athlete pool. A university or national sports institute partnership changes that math in a specific, structural way: the university brings sports science research demand, student-athlete programmes and grant-funded research budgets that can run through the off-season and off-peak hours the national team isn't using, while the federation brings the athlete population that justifies the facility's specification in the first place. Neither party alone typically has the volume to fill a calendar; together, they usually do.
This is the same audience-segmentation logic that applies to any inclined facility — a national team's training blocks are one segment among several, not the only one the schedule has to serve. What differs here is that the second segment is research and education funding rather than tourism.
4. What off-season operation actually requires
A facility that only runs during a competitive team's active training season is, by construction, idle for a large share of the year — exactly the gap a university partnership, a broader athlete-development programme, or controlled access for other federations can fill. Planning for that from the concept stage — rather than treating it as an afterthought once the facility already exists — is what separates a federation facility that pays for itself from one that becomes a single-purpose cost centre.
5. What this means for your programme
Tell us your discipline, your athlete population, and whether a university or institute partner is part of the conversation , and we'll help you build a concept — speed range, angle range, chamber size and a realistic utilisation model — sized to what your programme can actually sustain, not a generic commercial facility scaled down.
Sources and notes
- Current federation practice of renting or sharing rather than owning dedicated facilities (American Nordic Combined athletes training at a commercial facility in Slovenia with partial National Nordic Foundation grant support; the United States and Norway sharing ski jumping coaches and facilities under a bilateral agreement; FIS-funded suit research conducted through an automotive wind tunnel facility rather than a purpose-built sports venue): consistent with TownLift, "Park City athletes train in European wind tunnel for ski jumping skills", ESPN, "United States, Norway to share ski jumping coaches, facilities in unprecedented partnership", and Virmavirta et al., "Influence of suit size and air permeability on performance in ski jumping. Part I: wind tunnel measurements," Frontiers in Sports and Active Living, 2025.
- Discipline-specific speed and angle ranges (ski jump flight tunnels at roughly 145–170 mph with 14°–35° adjustable flight angle; wingsuit tunnels at roughly 90–130 km/h with a lower, glide-appropriate incline): consistent with our published articles on
and
engineering an inclined wind tunnel.
- Audience-segmentation and calendar-utilisation logic (dedicated blocks for a small, engaged athlete population alongside other segments that fill the rest of the schedule) is developed in more depth in our article on
.