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No one could suggest that the Winter Olympics are lacking in challenge. Skiers zipping down the slopes and flying through the air. Skeletons hurtling around at more than 100km/h. Ice skaters, metal-bladed, spinning, leaping and twisting. Slopestyle athletes pulling off the most outrageous tricks while landing the biggest air. But everyone from recreational skiers to the most extreme sports enthusiasts knows there is always room for more.
Enter the new kid on the ice block at Milano Cortina 2026: ski mountaineering. The new challenge? How about going up the mountain, hiking a bit, followed by a rapid descent on the tiniest skis possible. Before you ask, “why”? Cast your mind over the other disciplines on the schedule and remember that the answer is almost always, “why not”?
However, ski mountaineering – or skimo – in its traditional form is entirely about practicality. When skiing as a sport started to take off in the 1800s – that is, well before chairlifts existed – to traverse the slopes inevitably required uphill and downhill movement, as well as navigating rocky mountain terrain and weaving through forests. While people still do that – whether it’s ski touring or backcountry skiing – it doesn’t make for an easily digestible Olympics package. The sport had to be brought into the modern era. The International Ski Mountaineering Federation (ISMF) has created a version of the sport ready for commercialisation, accessibility and consumption – and therefore, the Winter Olympics.
From 19 February, the northern Italian town of Bormio will host two skimo events. Sprint and mixed relay races on-piste will offer audiences a fast, fun showcase of athletic ability – an intensified taste of what the sport has to offer. The director of the ISMF, Ramone Cooper, who has led the sport’s evolution to its Olympic debut, says the differences between skimo and alpine or Nordic skiing come down to equipment used and the technical transitions between the three elements of ascent, mountaineering (called boot-packing) and descent.
“Compared to downhill skiing, where you have the stability and strength in a wider, heavier ski with strong bindings and strong boots, ski mountaineering is all about moving through the mountains in really lightweight equipment,” Cooper says. “In the sprint events the transitions play a really significant role because it’s very difficult to gain seconds in the descent and also in the ascent, but you can easily lose seconds in the transition. So it’s become tactically really important to have very strong transitions because there’s very little margin for error.”
If ascending on skis sounds like a sisyphean task, there’s a trick for that and it’s a unique feature of the sport. Skimo athletes use “skins”, which are thin strips of grippy synthetic material, attached to the underside of their skis to provide traction on the snow. With the heel free from the binding on the ski, they can ascend at a blistering pace, only slowing to navigate around the “diamonds” on the course.
The first transition is from skinning to boot-packing. This requires athletes quickly clicking out of their skis, stowing them on their back, and adjusting the levers on their boots to convert them from stiff ski-mode to flexible walk-mode. In their super lightweight boots they can hike and climb to the next transition and swap back to skins by doing the reverse. Then, to transition from skinning to skiing for the descent, athletes unhook the skins at the end of the skis, peel them off, stuff them in a pouch on their Lycra race suits, and set the ski bindings to lock in the heel.
Like other winter sports, skimo athletes are in the midst of a World Cup season, and French athletes Emily Harrop and Thibault Anselmet laid down a marker for the Olympics by winning the men’s and women’s sprints and the mixed relay at the final event. France, Spain, Italy and Switzerland have dominated the World Cup circuit so far, and the local athletes will undoubtedly receive a boost from the home crowd in Bormio.
It’s just the beginning for this version of the sport, which will almost inevitably take over from the longer, more traditional skimo disciplines due to climate change. Reduced snow is already changing the way the ISMF design the calendar. However, the sport requires very little infrastructure, which gives it more flexibility.
“We have events that start off snow,” Cooper says. “Some of the distance events start in villages and you have athletes that are then ascending [on boots] until they reach the snow line. The sprint and mixed relay in order to have that reliability have been run within resort areas where there is snowmaking. That’s a relatively new concept as well that we’re hosting these events within artificial snow areas. But that is the reality of how the snow is now.”
Ski mountaineers are no strangers to the climate fight – many having spent their whole lives traversing mountains and glaciers, bearing closer witness to the rising snowline and shrinking ice than most. After Milano Cortina the ISMF will be faced with the unenviable challenge of pushing for its sport’s expansion at French Alps 2030 – where the longer distance events would really shine – while unchecked global heating transforms the alpine environment more and more each year.
