There’s all kinds of stuff happening in this here second week of the Olympics, from Norwegians Scandinavianly wandering into the forest, to various Olympians cozymaxxing, to this Italian short track speed skater I saw finish two races backward, once on accident and once on purpose. But despite the glut, I am mostly looking forward to the forthcoming Olympic debut of one of the most painful sports imaginable: ski mountaineering, or skimo.
The competitive premise of ski mountaineering is essentially that cross-country skiing, already one of the most lung-intensive sports on the planet, presents an insufficient test of its athletes cardiovascular limits. It is as if organizers looked at the otherworldly abilities of Johannes Klæbo (and the howling misery of Jessie Diggins), and conceived of a way to introduce more suffering. “I think they are the athletes who have the highest pain threshold and can really suffer,” German skimo physician Dr. Volker Schöffl told NBC. “They sprint, they run and then, you know, gradually everybody is dying around you until one man is standing and finishing first.”
You can think of skimo as a sort of triathlon that combines cross-country skiing, regular-style skiing, and trail running. Competitors first ski uphill with the help of adhesive climbing skins on the front of their skis, then peel the skins from their skis and descend back to the bottom again. Now the competitors repeat the climb, but in a more difficult way: For the second climb, the athletes stow their skis in their backpacks and run up the hill in their boots. They then descend again.
The decisive part of the event is the alveoli-shredding uphill fare, which also makes the fine-motor skill transitions significantly more difficult; also, the downhill skiing is much harder than the alpine variety seen elsewhere in the Olympics. The skis used in skimo are much lighter and therefore way harder to control.
As a young sport without the specialization and infrastructure of its competitors, and as a sport whose premise is Your Legs Will Fall Off And Then You Will Die, skimo for now largely draws its athletes from other endurance sports. Spain’s Kilian Jornet, perhaps the greatest living endurance athlete, is a skimo guy. Both U.S. skimo athletes are decorated trail runners, and Anna Gibson nearly made the U.S. team for the Paris olympics in the 1,500-meter race. The favorite in the men’s race is Swiss skyrunner (somehow a real sport) Remi Bonnet, whose bona fides include the world record in the vertical kilometer.
Several prominent cyclists either have gotten into the sport or plan to do so. Recently retired Tour de France stage-winner Michael Woods is just getting into it, as is Giro d’Italia stage-winner Joe Dombrowski. (Speaking of the Giro, the sprint course at these Games is on the legendary Stelvio.) Former junior skimo world championship medalist Quinn Simmons is one of the stronger domestiques in the sport, and he’s said he wants to compete in the 2030 Games. It works in the opposite direction too, as Red Bull signed skimo champion Anton Palzer in 2021.
As a racing enthusiast, I’m very drawn to a sport capable of inflicting this much pain. What sets skimo apart from other suffering contests is its variety. Squint at skimo and you can see a better approximation of the hearty roundedness biathlon is going for: The combination of cross-country skiing and shooting a purpose-made rifle is a much more affected version of the ruggedness that skimo is going for, a streamlined counterpart to the beautifully exploratory aspects that make skimo so cool. Obviously skimo is specialized as well, but I am attracted to how simple its proposition ultimately is: There’s a mountain over there. Go deal with it.
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