SkiMo Was Boring To Watch at The Olympics

Welcome to the Last Chair with Jack O’Brien, a new backpage-style column that will focus on human-interest stories and ski culture. A new installment will run every other week.

I’ll readily admit it. Even as someone who religiously ski tours—who tracks their times and even skins with a weighted backpack occasionally—I’ve always felt an aversion to ski mountaineering (skimo) races.

Maybe it’s the Lycra, or the many hearty good mornings! I’ve uttered on predawn resort tours that have been disregarded by dutifully training if agro skimo dudes. But more than anything, I’ve always felt that the sport seemed to get skiing backwards; the race is brutally competitive, and won or lost not via actually skiing, but on the ascent, or even how quickly one—of all things—transitions to downhill mode.

The subordinate role-making that turns play in skimo racing, where carbon-light toothpicks are employed for flailing down steep runs by the skin of one’s teeth, feels apostate to the transcendence and excitement that aggressive, strong downhill skiing naturally elicits.

My own misgivings aside, skimo ascended to Olympic inclusion this year at Milan-Cortina, the first such time the rising sport has been held on winter sports’ grandest stage. But true to modern Olympic form, where newcomer events are sometimes simplified or trivialized compared to their typical form, skimo’s fate was to be tailored for TV audiences. And in that miniaturized version, something ironic happened; I realized the grandeur of true skimo racing, and came to feel that it could be just as–perhaps even more–consumable for that once-every-four-year television audience in its true form.

The Olympic skimo event garnered a fair share of buzz leading up to the Games. From Slate’s lighthearted (if perhaps dismissive) introduction of the event to The New York Time’s more measured, if consumable treatise on the sport, skimo’s Olympic coming out party seemed to spark a certain novel interest toward a take on skiing that many watchers were perhaps befuddled by, regardless of how many actual skiers take part in adjacent pursuits (like skimo itself, recreational resort touring on ski resorts has had a meteoric rise over the past decade-plus). 

Skimo was fodder for further discussion when it was reassessed after the games. The same Slate writer later noted that “it gives me no joy to inform you that, as it turns out, Olympic skimo is boring and bad.” Writing for The Independent, Flo Clifford opined that skimo’s Olympic version “has all the symptoms of 21st century sport – gimmicky, snappy, seemingly designed for social media hits – but none of what Olympic sport is all about.”

Others in the know panned the brutally abbreviated Olympic version as little resembling what skimo races usually entail.

In its typical form, the craft takes place on a wide range of mountains and courses, culminating in the La Grande Course, a circuit of elite long-distance, team skimo events held in the Alps each winter. The Pierra Menta—one of the main events of La Grande Course—takes place at Arêches-Beaufort in the French Alps, where over four days, skiers ascend and descend nearly ten thousand meters of rugged alpine mountains.

Competitors bootpack up features like the Grand Journee, a steep, aesthetic couloir at roughly 8,000 feet in elevation, and take on technical, alpine ridgeline traverses on the Grand Mont.

But skimo’s Olympic version was a far cry from the Pierra Menta. And the event mainlined novelty over the often brutalistic beauty that is endemic to skimo racing. Typically undertaken on longer, alpine venues, the Olympic course employed a strange maze-like ascending section that gave way to a boot pack not on a ridgeline nor up a couloir, but on physical, wooden stairs. Another quick skied ascent led to the final descent, complete with groomed snow and slalom gates. All in about three minutes.

I won’t go so far as to say that the athletes deserve better; I’m in little position to judge how a competitor might feel about having the opportunity to be on the Olympic stage. But even as someone who had my own misgivings about skimo before, the Olympic version has perhaps paradoxically ingratiated me to the sport in its typical form, where breathtaking, huge mountains are taken to in a wild, competitive fashion, even if the Lycra-clad racers don’t fit my tidy definition of skiing.

Now, it’s the Olympic take on skimo racing that leaves something to be desired.

To that I ask, why distill the event into something so minuscule that it hardly reflects the actual sport and its essence that garnered it Olympic attention in the first place? Instead of a three-minute sprint, give the competitors and the viewers huge vert, breathtaking mountains, and hair-raising descents on those toothpick skis. Who wouldn’t watch that?

Give us drone footage of the Dolomites; steep bootpacks amongst ancient volcanic spires. And while the actual skiing is often of the flailing sort, it’s still part of the wild, esoteric essence that is skimo racing. No gates needed.

Some might feel that skimo racing takes the most soulful of winter sports and distills it to a Strava-induced drone fest. That is but one perspective. But what has been done to skimo in its Olympic form is perhaps more deeply heretical.

Let these competitors do what they always do: go to the big mountains, race in their unique way, and cover it for those watching at home using modern technology to elicit its true form.

Why not put that all together? Perhaps, even skimo curmudgeons like myself might even give that a watch.

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