{"id":88979,"date":"2026-02-21T10:21:26","date_gmt":"2026-02-21T13:21:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ubirataonline.com.br\/winter-olympics-ski-mountaineering-makes-no-sense-and-its-sort-of-awesome\/"},"modified":"2026-02-21T10:21:26","modified_gmt":"2026-02-21T13:21:26","slug":"winter-olympics-ski-mountaineering-makes-no-sense-and-its-sort-of-awesome","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ubirataonline.com.br\/en\/winter-olympics-ski-mountaineering-makes-no-sense-and-its-sort-of-awesome\/","title":{"rendered":"Winter Olympics: Ski mountaineering makes no sense … and it’s sort of awesome"},"content":{"rendered":"

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BORMIO, Italy \u2014 The undeniably cool part of ski mountaineering\u2019s Olympic debut<\/a> here Thursday was the visual spectacle. If you\u2019re going to add a fairly ridiculous, counterintuitive sport to the Winter Games \u2014 why would anyone trek up<\/em> a hill on skis in 2026 when Robert Winterhalder gave us the ski lift in 1908? \u2014 you might as well do it in the thickest, whitest, nastiest snowstorm Northern Italy has seen all month.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe love winter, so I\u2019m here for it,\u201d said 26-year-old American Anna Gibson, who was almost certainly the happiest ninth-place finisher in any event at the entire Olympics.<\/p>\n

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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! <\/em>or two in the media center when Ana Alonso Rodriguez took bronze in the women\u2019s sprint and Oriol Cardona Coll won gold in the men\u2019s.)<\/p>\n

As long as you didn\u2019t 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\u2019t ski off a ramp and do flips and twists 50 feet in the air because a little snow makes it too dangerous?<\/p>\n

Ski mountaineering \u2014 skimo to the initiated \u2014 succumbs to no such wokeness.<\/p>\n

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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\u2019t going to be good enough to do it in other sports.<\/p>\n

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\u201cI heard it was going to be in the Olympics, and I very quickly started practicing,\u201d said Australia\u2019s Lara Hamilton. \u201cAlways had the dream to go to the Olympics. I just failed in three different sports until I got one.\u201d<\/p>\n

What were the three sports?<\/p>\n

\u201cNordic skiing, track 5,000 meters, surfing at one point, now skimo,\u201d said Hamilton, who finished last in her heat by nearly 20 seconds.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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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.<\/p>\n

Take the two Americans who competed Thursday.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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\u201cI had no idea what it was or what she was talking about,\u201d said Smith, who looks exactly like the kind of person you\u2019d 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. \u201cI got hooked on the mode of travel.\u201d<\/p>\n

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