BORMIO, Italy — The undeniably cool part of ski mountaineering’s Olympic debut here Thursday was the visual spectacle. If you’re going to add a fairly ridiculous, counterintuitive sport to the Winter Games — why would anyone trek up a hill on skis in 2026 when Robert Winterhalder gave us the ski lift in 1908? — you might as well do it in the thickest, whitest, nastiest snowstorm Northern Italy has seen all month.
“We love winter, so I’m here for it,” said 26-year-old American Anna Gibson, who was almost certainly the happiest ninth-place finisher in any event at the entire Olympics.
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Gibson was here for it, and so were a couple thousand fans who packed the grandstand near the finish area and lined the sides of the course, many of them waving Swiss and French and even a few very wet Spanish flags. (Yes, Spain is almost a complete non-entity at the Winter Games but is oddly good at this event. There was even a Vamos! or two in the media center when Ana Alonso Rodriguez took bronze in the women’s sprint and Oriol Cardona Coll won gold in the men’s.)
As long as you didn’t care about getting soaked, and perhaps flash-frozen, watching these athletes go up the hill on skis lined with a traction-generating skin, navigate a few random obstacles and then ski back down, it seemed like a really good time. At least they got to see some action, unlike people who had tickets to postponed events like aerials or the freeski halfpipe qualifications on Thursday. What, you can’t ski off a ramp and do flips and twists 50 feet in the air because a little snow makes it too dangerous?
Ski mountaineering — skimo to the initiated — succumbs to no such wokeness.
And the athletes were truly grateful for that because for the ones who have been doing it for a long time on the World Cup circuit with no Olympic medal to shoot for, this was the ultimate validation for a lifetime of work pursuing a sport that truly makes no sense. It was a similar feeling for the athletes who took it up recently because they wanted to make an Olympics and weren’t going to be good enough to do it in other sports.
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“I heard it was going to be in the Olympics, and I very quickly started practicing,” said Australia’s Lara Hamilton. “Always had the dream to go to the Olympics. I just failed in three different sports until I got one.”
What were the three sports?
“Nordic skiing, track 5,000 meters, surfing at one point, now skimo,” said Hamilton, who finished last in her heat by nearly 20 seconds.
By the way, this does not make Hamilton a failure. It makes her a badass. During every Olympics, an army of couch potatoes log on to social media and muse about which sport they could try that would get them here in four years if they had enough time to practice. Those people are, of course, deluding themselves. Hamilton actually made it happen.
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And there is something kind of neat about the idea there are people who pretty much stumbled into skimo and wound up at the freaking Olympics.
Take the two Americans who competed Thursday.
Gibson was a lifelong skier growing up in Wyoming but spent much of her athletic career as a track athlete and distance runner and even competed in some NCAA track championships for University of Washington. She started doing skimo last year. Her first real race last December was the one that got her into the Olympics by teaming up with her friend, Cameron Smith, to secure the North American slot.
And how did Smith find skimo? He got turned onto it a dozen years earlier when his sister convinced him to try The Grand Traverse, a two-person backcountry ski race from Crested Butte to Aspen, Colorado.
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“I had no idea what it was or what she was talking about,” said Smith, who looks exactly like the kind of person you’d want to meet if you needed help on a backcountry trail in the Rocky Mountains, with his untrimmed red beard and flowing red hair pulled back in a ponytail. “I got hooked on the mode of travel.”
Cameron Smith competes in the ski mountaineering competition in Bormio, Italy. (Photo by Dustin Satloff/Getty Images)
(Dustin Satloff via Getty Images)
That opened up a whole new world, where he started winning national championships, competing on the World Cup circuit and even snagging his first podium in 2022.
Now here they were, two very unlikely American Olympians, hoping more people would get turned on to their hobby just like they did before it was a big deal on the biggest stage in sports.
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“It was super fun to be part of this historic moment and help introduce our sport to the world,” said Smith, who is better in the distance events than in the Olympic sprint, which lasts less than three minutes. “You can feel the excitement everyone has to see skimo. So many people worked so hard to make this happen. Everything we do from here is just icing on the cake.”
Smith and Gibson didn’t come close to making the finals stage, much less medaling, but they did advance into the semis as so-called “lucky losers,” meaning they didn’t finish in the top three of their heats but qualified for the next round because they were among the three fastest also-rans.
“Luckiest losers of all time right here!” Gibson said in an Instagram story they posted together after the heats.
Unfortunately for the plucky Americans, that was the end of the road. Once the best started racing against the best, it became clear that there are small group of people in the world who are way better at this than everyone else, and they pretty much all come from Switzerland, France and Spain.
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“I think you can feel that skimo is just part of the culture here,” said Gibson, who paired with Smith will be contenders in Saturday’s longer mixed relay. “It’s very normal. It’s very understood here, and to not have to explain what it is to people here and to know there are fans who have been supporters of this sport for a long time, it’s really special.”
Not to mix a metaphor here, but this is the question now: Is skimo on its way up or down as an Olympic sport after its big debut?
On the plus side, it is somewhat entertaining. The races hold your attention because they last fewer than three minutes and there are no judging controversies.
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On the minus side, do we really need to be adding Olympic sports just to give the Swiss more shots at medals? Also, do we really want to be glorifying a sport where a key part of the contest is how fast you can unlock your skis from your boots to walk up stairs and then put them back on?
On a related note, I found myself wondering why the athletes have to find a place to put the “skins” from their skis — usually in a knapsack — before going back downhill. It seems like after all that work, you should just be able to leave it on the ground and have someone come pick it up. Total waste of time. I did, however, appreciate the ingenuity of one guy who just stuffed it down the front of his pants, which truly seemed like a win-win for him. Maybe he was headed to ski jump after this.
And finally, if this were a real mountain sport and not a total gimmick, wouldn’t Norway be good at it?
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In all seriousness, it was neat to watch a sport so obscure that the biggest question for every athlete is how they found it in the first place. And all those stories are fun and different, and you could sense how much it meant to them to share that with a worldwide audience.
“Finally we get to play in the major leagues,” said Cardona, the newly minted gold medalist.
Time will tell if skimo sticks around the Olympics. But 118 years after the invention of the ski lift, which should have made this sport obsolete, it finally had its moment. Better late than never.
