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The sport of ski mountaineering is making its debut at the Winter Olympics in Italy this year. Skimo, as athletes call it today, involves racing up steep mountains on skis before turning around and racing back down. NPR's Kirk Siegler sent us this story from the last Olympic qualifier event in Utah.
UNIDENTIFIED ANNOUNCER: We have No. 23 - Matt Ripa, Canada.
KIRK SIEGLER, BYLINE: To a newbie spectator, a ski mountaineering comp is a little wild and weird. First, it looks like an ordinary cross-country ski race...
(CROSSTALK)
SIEGLER: ...Except they're going straight uphill. They have adhesive climbing skins attached to the bottom of their skis so they don't slide backwards.
So they just climbed up 300 feet or so in skins and then ripped them off in the transition. Transition is everything. Now they're coming down a slalom-type course - actually, in pretty deep powder.
UNIDENTIFIED ANNOUNCER: And they come down (ph).
SIEGLER: Now, it's like an alpine race. They scream down the mountain. There's even a jump, and then they have to do the whole thing again, climb back up and race back down.
SARAH COOKLER: Yeah, yeah, it's like an X Games event with a lot of endurance athletes.
SIEGLER: But Sarah Cookler, head of sport for USA Skimo, says a lot of it is mental concentration.
COOKLER: Now you add the element of them racing uphill together as well, jockeying for position, being tactical and strategic to get into the different parts of the course before somebody else.
SIEGLER: These are hardcore athletes and most are ex-ski racers like Anna Gibson of Jackson, Wyoming. She's now a full-time professional trail runner, which is hard to do in Jackson Hole in the winter, so she got into skimo only recently.
ANNA GIBSON: It's also a little bit ridiculous. You know, it's like, oh, this is, like, so crazy watching these people try to ski fast. It's not something that the average person is necessarily doing. But it's, like, a really action-packed race. Things are happening super quickly.
SIEGLER: Racers say it all comes down to how fast you can transition from climbing up to skiing down. Three seconds can be make or break. Here's Jessie Young of Aspen, Colorado, practicing jumping up and ripping her skins off in one swoop before the World Cup race at Solitude resort.
JESSIE YOUNG: And that's it (laughter). Boom.
SIEGLER: All right.
Young has been on and off the World Cup circuit since 2015.
YOUNG: Yeah, I think, for me, it's a little bittersweet.
SIEGLER: Bittersweet because the two skimo events debuting at the Olympics, the sprint and mixed relay, are more friendly for TV and a broader audience. Skimo grew out of a century-old tradition in the Alps, alpinist mountaineering that turned into competitions, racing over glaciers, hiking on snowy remote ridges with crampons on your ski boots.
YOUNG: I think a lot of the athletes would love to see the individual format, which is more the soul of the sport, featured. But this is a great start, and it definitely makes for a fun spectator event.
SIEGLER: In Utah, fans lined the course to see if the two favorite Americans on the mixed male, female relay - Anna Gibson, the trail runner, and her teammate Cam Smith of Crested Butte, Colorado - would grab the last two open spots for this Olympics. Europeans, who have dominated the sport for years, are expected to win most of the medals in Italy.
(CHEERING)
SIEGLER: Gibson's dad, Les, beamed as his daughter charged up the snowy slope. He remembers how she'd get up before elementary school and skin up before the Jackson Hole tram started spinning.
LES: You know, ski mountaineering, in a lot of ways, is an individual sport done in a team for safety. I think it is - it's great that it's on the world stage.
SIEGLER: World stage it will be for Anna Gibson and Cam Smith after winning here before Christmas. Anna told me it's wild having it all happen this fast. Kirk Siegler, NPR News, Salt Lake City.
(SOUNDBITE OF GIANTS' NEST'S "SURF THE ORANGE WATER") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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