GENEVA -- Sign stealing in baseball. Match fixing in soccer. Doping allegations in swimming. Now ski jumping has its own scandal that escalated Wednesday.
Cheating by Norway team officials manipulating ski suits has shaken a national reputation for fair play and high-minded principles at their home Nordic world championships, where the host team dominated the medal table.
Two Olympic gold medalists, Marius Lindvik and Johann André Forfang, had denied involvement since the allegations emerged over the weekend but were suspended Wednesday and put under formal suspicion in an investigation overseen by the International Ski and Snowboard Federation. They now cannot compete in a World Cup event in Oslo that starts Thursday.
Lindvik and Forfang already had been disqualified from the large hill event in Trondheim on Saturday, days after Lindvik soared to become world champion on the normal hill.
Though both athletes were backed by the Norwegian team insisting they knew nothing about deliberately altered ski suits, their head coach Magnus Brevig and equipment manager Adrian Livelten confessed and were suspended from their jobs.
"FIS has provisionally suspended three Norwegian team officials and two athletes who are being investigated for their alleged involvement in illegal equipment manipulation," the Switzerland-based governing body said in a statement.
An assistant coach, Thomas Lobben, also is part of an investigation in which FIS-appointed investigators have seized all the home Norway team's suits used at worlds.
The scandal has shocked the ski jumping world, raising questions about how widespread this practice is, and tarnished Norway's standing for honesty in sports.
What has emerged involves team officials manipulating pre-approved and microchipped suits to increase their size and improve aerodynamics to help athletes fly further.
It was revealed in footage secretly filmed from behind a curtain then sent by a whistleblower to international media. A FIS official said the illegal alterations were subsequently confirmed by tearing apart the seams of the crotch area on the offending Norwegian ski suits.
"The only thing that matters for FIS is to leave this process 100% convinced that the sport is free from any form of manipulation," its secretary general Michel Vion said in a statement.
Brevig and Livelten admitted they had cheated, though just on one occasion, ahead of the large hill event held Saturday.
"We regret it like dogs, and I'm terribly sorry that this happened," Brevig said. "I don't really have anything else to say other than that we got carried away in our bubble."
Livelten apologized to the disqualified athletes plus "sponsors, the jumping family and the Norwegian people" for an act of cheating he said was "completely unacceptable."