“We love winter, so I’m here for it,” said American Anna Gibson, 26, who was almost certainly the ninth-happiest finisher in any event of the entire Olympics.
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Gibson was here for it, as were a couple thousand fans who filled the stands near the finish area and lined the sides of the track, many of them waving Swiss and French flags and even some very wet Spanish flags. (Yes, Spain practically does not participate in the Winter Games, but it is strangely good at this event. There was even a Come on! or two in the press center when Ana Alonso Rodríguez took bronze in the women’s sprint and Orio Cardona Coll won gold in the men’s).
As long as you didn’t mind getting wet, and maybe instantly freezing, watching these athletes climb the hill on skis lined with traction-generating skin, negotiate some random obstacles, and then ski back down seemed like a pretty good time. At least they got to see some action, unlike people who had tickets to postponed events like aerials or Thursday’s freeski halfpipe qualifications. What, you can’t ski off a ramp and do pirouettes and turns 50 feet in the air because a little snow makes it too dangerous?
Ski mountaineering (skimo for the initiated) does not succumb to such an awakening.
And the athletes were really grateful for that because for those who have been doing it for a long time on the World Cup circuit without any Olympic medals to aim for, this was the ultimate validation of a lifetime of work in a sport that really has no meaning. It was a similar feeling for athletes who did it recently because they wanted to participate in an Olympic Games and they weren’t going to be good enough to do it in other sports.Advertisement
“I heard it was going to be at the Olympics and I quickly started practicing,” said Australian Lara Hamilton. “I always had a dream of going to the Olympics. I just failed at three different sports until I got one.”
What were the three sports?
“Nordic skiing, 5,000-meter track, surfing one moment, now skimo,” said Hamilton, who finished last in her heat by nearly 20 seconds.
By the way, this doesn’t make Hamilton a failure. That makes her a badass. During every Olympics, an army of couch potatoes log on to social media and ponder what sport they could try that would get them here in four years if they had enough time to practice. Those people, of course, are fooling themselves. Hamilton really made it happen.
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And there’s something interesting about the idea that there are people who practically stumbled into skimo and ended up in the damn Olympics.
Take the two Americans who competed on 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 a few NCAA track championships for the University of Washington. He started skimoing last year. Her first real race last December was the one that took her to the Olympics as she teamed up with her friend, Cameron Smith, to secure a spot in North America.
And how did Smith find skiMo? He got into it a dozen years earlier, when his sister convinced him to try The Grand Traverse, a two-person ski touring race from Crested Butte to Aspen, Colorado.
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“I had no idea what it was or what he was talking about,” said Smith, who looks exactly like the kind of guy you’d want to meet if you needed help on an off-road trail in the Rocky Mountains, with his untrimmed red beard and loose red hair pulled back into a ponytail. “I got hooked on the way of traveling.”
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 for him, where he began winning national championships, competing on the World Cup circuit, and even scoring his first podium in 2022.
Now here they were, two very unlikely American Olympians, hoping to get more people interested in their hobby just like they did before it was a big deal on sports’ biggest stage.
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“It was super fun to be a part of this historic moment and help introduce our sport to the world,” said Smith, who is better at distance events than this Olympic sprint, which lasts less than three minutes. “You can feel the excitement that everyone has to see skimo. A lot of people worked very hard to make this happen. Everything we do from here is just the icing on the cake.”
Smith and Gibson came nowhere close to reaching the final stage, let alone earning a medal, but they advanced to the semi-finals as so-called “lucky losers”, meaning that they did not finish in the top three of their heats, but qualified for the next round because they were among the three fastest losers.
“The luckiest losers of all time are here!” Gibson said in an Instagram story they posted together after the playoffs.
Unfortunately for the brave Americans, that was the end of the road. Once the best started competing against the best, it became clear that there is a small group of people in the world who are much better at this than everyone else, and almost all of them 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 along with Smith will be contenders in Saturday’s longer medley relay. “It’s very normal. It’s very well understood here, and not having to explain what it is to people here and knowing that there are fans who have supported this sport for a long time, is really special.”
I don’t want to mix up a metaphor here, but here’s the question now: is skimo on the rise or decline as an Olympic sport after its big debut?
The good thing is that it is somewhat entertaining, the races attract attention because they last less than three minutes and there are no controversies between the judges.
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On the negative side, do we really need to add Olympic sports just to give the Swiss more chances to win medals? Plus, do we really want to glorify a sport where a key part of the contest is how quickly you can take your skis out of your boots to climb stairs and then put them back on?
On a related note, I wondered why athletes have to find a place to store their ski “skins” (usually in a backpack) before going back down. It seems like after all that work, you should be able to put it down and have someone come pick it up. Total waste of time. However, I appreciated the ingenuity of one guy who simply stuffed it down the front of his pants, which he really thought was a win-win. Maybe he was headed ski jumping 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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Seriously though, it was great to see a sport so obscure that the biggest question for every athlete is how they found it in the first place. And all of those stories are fun and different, and you can feel how much it meant to them to share them with a global audience.
Time will tell if skimo remains in the Olympics. But 118 years after the invention of the ski lift, which should have made the sport obsolete, its time has finally come. Better late than never.