Ski mountaineering, or SkiMo, isn’t just about who is the fastest on snow. When teams head to the Olympic Winter Games Milano Cortina 2026, they face a massive variable they can’t control, which is the mountain itself.
Everything from snow quality to wind speed shapes the final results. Andrea Gianni, a former coach, explains that “the environment and location make all the difference in terms of altitude, slope, temperature, terrain type and morphology.”
Basically, the mountain decides how the race goes.
The Oxygen Challenge At the Olympics
The biggest technical hurdle here is altitude. Racing at 2,000 meters is totally different from racing at sea level. There is less oxygen, which hits your physical performance hard. But it also affects your ability to think clearly.
This matters because SkiMo involves complex mechanical transitions. Athletes have to take skins off their skis, stuff them into pockets, and switch to downhill mode in seconds. If your brain is foggy from lack of oxygen, you make mistakes.
That is why athletes are using summer training camps to get their bodies ready for thin air. French star Emily Harrop trained in the Pyrenees to get used to the feeling.
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“It’s true that it was not bad for us to experience a bit of hypoxia in the summer,” Harrop said. “So it’s not bad to do [it for] periods.”
Gianni backs this up. He believes you have to train in the Alps because “the conditions are the same as those experienced by athletes from the strongest European nations.” He added, “I would say that the conditions found in the Alps are difficult to replicate elsewhere.”
Steep Slopes and Mental Games
Then there is the terrain at the Stelvio Ski Centre in Bormio. It is beautiful, sure, but it is incredibly steep. During a test event in February 2025, even local favorites struggled with the geography. Italian athlete Giulia Compagnoni noted the sheer difficulty of the ascents.
“In the uphill part, it’s so strong and difficult,” she said. “The energy for the final [and] semi-final is tough to find, and it’s so difficult to maintain the concentration.”
It becomes a test of pure endurance. Finn Hösch pointed out that you need that stamina just “to make it to the top and to get down safely.”
So how do you handle a mountain that tries to break you? Team USA’s Anna Gibson suggests a shift in perspective.
“Instead of thinking, ‘I’m going to go out and battle against these crazy elements’, I try to think about it like, ‘OK, we’re all going through this; we’re all experiencing this: that’s ski racing’,” she says.
