All (both) of my longtime readers know that I like to dip my toe — really, my whole foot and sometimes up to my calf — into obscure sports. I've devoted words in this space to netball, candlepin bowling, and a panoply of ESPN The Ocho events.
The Olympics create a unique opportunity to get into a new sports, because more often than not these days, the games will add new sports each edition, and Olympic coverage means things like camera work and graphics will be top-notch. That makes the sport easier to learn.
In the 2024 Paris games, that was breakdancing, which went viral after the Australian competitor known as Raygun appeared to be orders of magnitude worse than the other breakdancers, which led to the integrity of the Olympic breakdancing qualifying process to be called into question, at least as far as she was concerned. You remember Raygun.
So I duly got into it, but my interest did not last. At the end of the day, I don't think I'm ever going to get into any sports where the winners and losers depend entirely on the scoring of judges. At least in boxing, you can override the judges by knocking out your foe.
For the 2026 Milan winter games, though, the new sports was ski mountaineering, or "skimo" for short.
Skimo has four disciplines at the international "World Cup" level: individual, vertical, sprint, and relay. Only the latter two were medal events in these games, so they are the only ones I can write about.
Let's start with sprint. The skiers race in groups of six over a course with several different sections.
First, there's the uphill section, where the skiers clamber up a hill on their skis. After that, there is the "diamond" section, also uphill, but now you have to work your way around large rails placed together in the shape of (you guessed it) a diamond. Or rather, several of them.
Then, you have to take your skis off and toss them in a small loop in the back of your ski suit like putting arrows in a quiver, before ascending some goddamn stairs.
After climbing up the stairs (no rails, but you have your ski poles to help you), you put your skis back on for another small uphill section, before you finally get a tiny bit of relief by doing some downhill — but not before you rip the "skins" off your your skis and tuck them into a pouch on your chest. You must do this, completely, or else it's a penalty. The sprint concludes at the finish line of the downhill section.
So, the simplest I can explain it "obstacle course skiing." Perhaps just as important as the sections of the course are the "transition zones" between the sections. I've described two of them — the one where you have to take your skis off before climbing the stairs, and the ones where you have to take the skins off your skis before commencing the downhill portion — and as I've tried to convey, these transitions have to be done in a very specific way, lest you be penalized.
Then there's the mixed relay. Take the sprint course as described above. Add an additional uphill section at the beginning that's much longer than the sprint uphill section, and also contains rails that jut out alternatively from the left and the right that you have to go around. Then you have a downhill section, then you basically have to do the entire sprint course as described above, and also make certain adjustments to your skis before tagging in your relay partner after you've finished all this. Then your partner will do a lap on the same course, then you again, and your partner again — so four laps, all told, with more sections and more transition zones.
So how long does all this take? The gold medal time for the men's sprint was a bit over two minutes and 34 seconds, the women's winning time was just a hair shy of three minutes, and the relay — with the longer course having to be gone through four times as you get increasingly more tired — took 26 minutes and 57 seconds for the winners to complete.
The biggest takeaway I can offer for this sport is that it is absolutely grueling. I can't think of no sport moreso. The announcers, trying to teach pikers like me, talk about the fire in your lungs, and how often you can't even remember the downhill portion once it's all said in done. And through it all you have to do some fairly precise, fiddly work (put away your skis and skins just so ... put them back on just so). The start of the race to its apex, where you begin the final downhill portion, is about 230 feet up.
If I'm going to ding it for anything, I certainly have misgivings about the stairs. Climbing up snow-covered, slippery stairs seems like a recipe for paralyzation, regardless of how much protection gear they are wearing.
One thing I've noticed about people talking/writing about a sport that's new to them (a better example in these games is curling, where Americans did pretty well) is they all have ideas about how this sport they really know nothing about can be improved, or how in its current form it's inherently flawed, or hackable.
That's just kind of arrogant and ignorant, so I try to refrain from that. Instead I will phrase my thought along those lines as a quandary that I don't get rather than thinking I've discovered some sort of trick.
That is this: you have to ski around the diamonds, not through them, although it would be easy to over, into, and out of them. Apparently, to do so would incur a three-second penalty. Am I wrong in thinking you could traverse the diamonds in less than three seconds, making it worth the penalty?
And speaking of penalties, one very nearly cost Spain the bronze in the mixed relay, which would have instead bestowed bronze on the U.S. The Spanish competitor prepped her skis for the tag-in of her partner outside of the transition zone, earning them a three second penalty, which is apparently known as a yellow card. Penalties in skimo are three seconds, 30 seconds, or disqualification, depending on severity. The Americans lodged a formal protest, contending that the Spaniards should have been levied a 30-second penalty rather than three seconds, but their protest was denied.
It was still a promising finish for the Americans, who came into the race ranked ninth, but finished fourth. The team of Anna Gibson (whose got into skimo by way of mountain running) and Cameron Smith (who looks like a cross between Trey Anastasio of Phish and Judah from Bojack Horseman) apparently do make a pretty decent relay team; they won the opening event of the Skimo World Cup this year in Utah (in winter sports contexts, "World Cup" basically means a tour, like we see in golf and tennis, not a single event, like in soccer). Gibson and Smith also qualified for the sprint events, but did not contend for podium places).
That Skimo World Cup is back in full force on March 6th in Azerbaijan, and it's free on YouTube on the International Ski Mountaineering channel.
That's great news for me, 'caused I frickin' loved it.
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