Racing down mountains on skis has been an Olympic sport since the German Winter Games in Garmisch-Partenkirchen in 1936. The Milan Cortina Winter Olympics will see a variation on the theme: racing up mountains.
Ski mountaineering, a combination of skiing and hiking, will debut as a medal sport in this year’s games, which start on Friday. Skimo, as it’s known, is the only completely new competition in the whole event – and long overdue, since it is one of mankind’s oldest winter activities. (Dual moguls is also a new sport in the Games, but it’s a variation of an existing race.)
“Skimo was an activity before it became a sport,” said Italy’s Robert Antonioli, the winner of seven gold medals in the skimo World Championships. “If you wanted to go from one mountain to another in the snow, you had to do skimo.”
Robert Antonioli grew up in the Italian Alps and embraced skimo in his teens, finding it a happy medium between downhill and cross-country skiing.Fabrizio Troccoli/The Globe and Mail
Before the invention of ski lifts, mountain people who needed to travel or hunt in the winter attached wooden boards to their feet and, no doubt, unstrapped them on the difficult bits. Some of the first-known skis are more than 1,000 years old.
In more recent times, military games inspired the development of what would become a sport. The 1924 Olympics in Chamonix, France, held a military patrol competition that required competitors to shoot guns at targets after skiing through the mountains. The sport evolved into the biathlon in later Olympics.
Skimo is effectively the son of the biathlon, without the bang-bang bits. The first skimo World Championships were held in 2002 in France. They take place every two years, alternating with continental championships. There is also a World Cup circuit held every year.
Bormio played host to Ski Mountaineering World Cup races last February, as a pre-Olympic test for the sport.Antonio Calanni/The Associated Press
A skimo climb can take up to three hours, with the skis removed for steeper sections.Antonio Calanni/The Associated Press
The sport took off during the COVID-19 pandemic, when training outdoors, alone in the cool, clean, winter mountain air, proved rather more appealing than being glued to the couch watching Netflix.
Skimo is still not a huge sport, but it has been gaining popularity in recent years and has captured the imaginations of northern Italians. Olympic skimo tickets have sold out in what Milan Cortina organizers called “an extraordinary public response” in a statement this week to journalists.
A total of only 36 male and female athletes will compete in Milan Cortina, in only two of the sport’s four recognized events: the sprint and the mixed relay, both of them on fairly short, groomed courses. They are to be held in the town of Bormio, home of the men’s Alpine ski competitions.
The individual and vertical races didn’t make the Olympic skimo cut. The individual race typically goes through ungroomed forests, where sustained coverage is impossible except by camera-equipped drones.
Italian athletes, including Mr. Antonioli, 36, and Nicolò Ernesto Canclini, 29, have performed well in the top international competitions in the past decade or so.
Mr. Antonioli, a soldier, is sponsored by the Italian military. He was born in a small town in the Italian Alps, near the Swiss border, and began skimo when he was 14.
He did so because he found it a good compromise between cross-country and downhill skiing – two sports he loved but neither of which he thought he could excel in.
He shone in the individual skimo race, which is a mass-start, flat-out event through ungroomed snow. The races typically last between 90 minutes and two or three hours and require several long climbs and descents.
It also involves “bootpack” sections, where the skis are removed and strapped to backpacks while athletes grind their way up steep or rocky sections on foot.
“Even the descents are difficult, because you are off-piste,” Mr. Antonioli said, referring to competing on ungroomed terrain. “We are sometimes so tired after this race that we collapse on the ground.”
Athletes have to carry their skis on steep ascents, which can be exhausting.Antonio Calanni/The Associated Press
Often it is the leader who is at a disadvantage, because he or she is cutting through fresh snow while the rest follow in the path, hoping the athlete at the front will tire and drop back.
Canada has some strong skimo athletes, but none of them made the Olympic cut (two from the United States did). Mr. Antonioli isn’t competing for Italy, either. The quota system left room for only three Italian skimo competitors. Mr. Antonioli isn’t upset, since his specialty – the individual race – was not on offer in Bormio. He is training for the skimo World Cup events in March in Azerbaijan.
“I’m 36 and been doing skimo for 16 years,” he said. “Some skimo athletes compete into their 40s. I will keep going.”
Julian Finney/Getty Images
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