The ‘breakdancing’ of the Winter Olympics with athletes ‘running like hamsters’: Welcome to ski mountaineering

No Olympics is ever the same: at every Games the IOC tinkers with the format, adding new events, dropping some sports and bringing in others.

Only one sport is brand new in Milano-Cortina: ski mountaineering – ‘skimo’ to those in the know – which makes its debut this week in Bormio. Organisers hope it will grab the public’s imagination in the same way as biathlon, this Games’ unexpected hit, or skeleton in the UK after a gold rush at the Cortina Sliding Centre.

Olympic skimo works as follows: first, the athletes sprint uphill on developed pistes with skins – which provide traction – on their skis, before taking their skis off and running in boots (‘bootpacking’) along a flat section of the piste. They then must complete another uphill section on skis, before stripping the skins off to ski downhill to the finish. In Bormio there are men’s and women’s events, as well as a mixed relay.

The Olympic races are incredibly quick, over in three or four minutes, testing athletes’ ability to transition rapidly between the equipment needed for each section – much like in triathlon – and putting under pressure their mastery of the all-important technical descent to the finish.

It’s the sort of sport that feels designed for the 21st century: fast-paced, changeable, and dramatic, with umpteen different things that can go wrong – such as athletes colliding in the transitional areas – that are perfect for social media hits.

Ski mountaineering as a sport is in fact as old as the hills and mountains the athletes ski on, with many non-Olympic races taking several hours or even days to complete on difficult off-piste terrain.

The IOC’s sports director Pierre Ducrey told The Independent that several factors went into bringing skimo into the Winter Games – the first time a new sport has been added to the programme since skeleton in 2002.

He said: “In the context of the Olympics, you need to first look at, what is the venue we can use to deliver the competition, and here in Bormio we had a perfect stage already existing for the sport. It’s a very important part of the Olympic agenda that we use existing venues.

“Then from a broadcast standpoint as well, the ability to have a theatre of action, a little bit like a stadium, is a big factor too in order to capture the essence of the sport in a way that can be spectacular. The long format [of ski mountaineering] is quite different in terms of what you can produce in terms of show, whereas here we feel we’re going to be able to create a stadium-like excitement for the sport.”

Ducrey admitted that trying to broaden the Games’ reach to a new, younger generation of sports viewers played a part in the thinking around adding skimo, and this particular format, to the programme. “I think in today’s world that’s a factor that you have to take into account. We don’t want it to be an absolute factor. But yes, the combination of the venue, the ability to broadcast it, and the fact that those are small, short, action-packed sequences, it checks a lot of boxes.”

While its introduction to the Winter Olympics has raised the profile of ski mountaineering, many athletes are unhappy with the format that has been chosen.

Some, including British ski mountaineer Iain Innes, have dubbed the Olympic format not ‘real’ skimo, and it is certainly a far cry from sport’s headline races like the Trofeo Mezzalama, which involve several thousand feet of altitude gain along steep couloirs and difficult ridgelines.

Innes, a former Alpine skier who switched to ski mountaineering and now trains in Chamonix, told The Independent: “It’s very controversial. I feel like some athletes have just accepted that that’s what the deal is and they’ve fully specialised in these new short races, and there’s very, very few athletes that are able to perform in the Olympic disciplines and then also in the more traditional disciplines.”

Innes said the Olympic format had been decided on without taking the athletes’ perspectives into account. “It certainly wasn’t athletes that said at the start, ‘Let’s make the races shorter and let’s put them on pistes and we’ll just run up and down like hamsters’.

“The problem is, it’s such a small and niche sport and there’s so little money in it. Somebody in an office has said, well, if we’re going to make ski mountaineering a viable sport, we need people to be interested in it, and we need people to be able to watch it on TV so that we can generate revenue and so that we can bring the sport into 2025.

“I think the only flaw with that logic is, ski mountaineering is such a small sport. People aren’t just randomly tuning in to watch a ski mountaineering race. People that watch ski mountaineering are ski mountaineering fans, and ski mountaineering fans are never going to watch a sprint race because it’s just not ski mountaineering.”

Ducrey pushed back on the idea that the Olympic format is gimmicky. He said: “It’s not like we invented this for the sake of the Olympic Games. You have people that are more specialised in the shorter format or the longer.

“You have it in cross country skiing, for example, people that are going for the long distance and others which are in the sprint categories, and they are very often not the same athletes. It kind of calls for a different kind of skill set. So, today I think the more explosive athletes probably have more chances to reach Olympic gold because of the format, but it is open to everybody.”

There are other issues with the fledgling event: there are only 18 men and 18 women competing, compared to around 100 men and 70 women at an average World Cup. Those spots are shared around somewhat unevenly, with the host nation having a double quota, as well as a system to ensure each continent is represented. That means that several competitive nations such as Canada, Slovenia and the Czech Republic haven’t made the cut; Team GB’s relatively new skimo squad didn’t qualify either.

“There’s lots of reasons for there to be mixed feelings about the Olympics,” Innes said. “It seems like the whole World Cup circuit is revolved around preparing for the Olympics, except only 20% of the circuit is actually going to be there. So that feels like an oversight.

“Right now, it very much just feels like what breakdancing was at the Summer Olympics.”

The hope for athletes like Innes is that if the current version of Olympic ski mountaineering is a success, the competition could be expanded in future Games, starting with the 2030 edition in the French Alps – both to include a better representation of the countries and athletes competing, and to showcase traditional ski mountaineering.

What is undeniable is that its inclusion in this year’s Olympics has brought skimo into the spotlight.

Innes said: “There wouldn’t be a British team and there wouldn’t be GB Skimo and the BMC [British Mountaineering Council, the national body] wouldn’t have put any money towards skimo if it wasn’t for the Olympics.” Two years ago there was no British team at all; GB Skimo as a governing body didn’t exist until a year and a half ago.

He continued: “The Olympics has brought lots of attention and avenues for funding, and a lot of positives. The standard of staff and the professionalism of all the teams in the last two or three years has just gone up like that,” he pointed upwards, “because there’s so much on the line now. I think it’s important to look at it from both sides.”

For now, it is skimo’s fast-paced, frenetic modern format which will look to capture audiences this week, as the IOC juggles different and often opposing aims – keeping athletes happy as well as appeasing broadcasters and keeping the juggernaut of the Olympics as a whole from getting stale.

Ducrey said: “For us, it’s about making sure we can adapt, evolve in the most exciting manner so that we can refresh, we can fine-tune in a way that keeps everybody excited, supports innovation, but also protects the tradition. Because a big element of the Olympic Games is that there is that kind of constant and consistency of what you’re going to see and enjoy. So the whole mission is finding the perfect balance between the two.” The final verdict will come this week, as the inaugural and divisive skimo tournament plays out.