Crested Butte mountain sport star and past Vail Hill Climb champion represents Team USA in inaugural Olympic skimo event

When Cam Smith cruised to a chill victory at the 2024 Vail Hill Climb, it was an early stop on his self-proclaimed “revenge tour of joy.” The ultimate end destination: the 2026 Olympic Games.

“It’s super fun to be part of this historic moment and help introduce our sport to the world,” the Crested Butte multi-mountain sport star said on Thursday after competing in the first-ever Olympic ski mountaineering competition. “I’m really excited to be here.”

Spain’s Oriol Cardona Coll and Switzerland’s Marianne Fatton won the men’s and women’s sprint gold medals in the inaugural event, held at the Stelvio Alpine Skiing Centre in Bormio, Italy. Heavy snow fell as 36 athletes — 18 men and 18 women — competed across three qualifying heats, two semifinals and a final. Smith advanced out of the heats but wound up sixth in his semifinal. The other American in the field, Jackson, Wyoming-native Anna Gibson, also missed out on the final, placing fifth in her semi.

But those results are just a small part of these trailblazers’ stories.

“It was incredible,” said Gibson, a former collegiate track athlete turned trail runner who made her skimo debut this winter. “Just standing on the start and seeing the Olympic rings on the hillside — it got really real.”

Support Local Journalism

Donate

Smith, who is originally from Rockford, Illinois, studied at Western Colorado University, where he got into mountain biking, trail running and eventually ski mountaineering. In 2014, his sister convinced him to pair up for The Grand Traverse, a point-to-point race between Crested Butte and Aspen.

“(She) wanted to do it together,” Smith said. “And I had no idea what it was or what she was talking about.”

His sibling helped him find some cheap gear. The goal was just to finish, he said. The result? A new passion.

“I was hooked on the mode of travel,” Smith said. “I just thought it was really a cool way to access the mountains and move in the mountains in the winter.”

The 30-year-old has gone on to set course records at the three largest skimo races in the country and collect 11 national titles. Locally, he’s topped podiums at everything from Vail Recreation District races to the GoPro Mountain Games. In addition to representing Team USA at multiple World Mountain and Trail Running World Championships, Smith also became the first North American to grace a World Cup skimo podium when he finished third in the vertical in Andorra on Jan. 14, 2022. The following February, however, he tore his ACL and meniscus crashing in a World Cup race. After a yearlong recovery, Smith returned to Andorra for the vertical in January 2024. The morning after placing seventh in his much awaited comeback, he dislocated his shoulder in the weight room, throwing away yet another winter.

What matters in your community, delivered daily.

Sign up for our morning newsletter at VailDaily.com/newsletter

But since the “revenge tour of joy,” Smith has been steadily sharpening his speed for Italy. An Olympic quota spot was still up for grabs, though, when he lined up with Gibson for the mixed relay at the ISMF Ski Mountaineering World Cup on Dec. 6 at Solitude Mountain Resort in Utah. Coming into the race, the pair was ranked 13th in the world standings, with only 12 going to the Games. Not only did they beat the Canadians to secure the final quota — they won the race outright.

“That was really cool just to share it with so many people who have been part of my journey, part of Anna’s journey and part of USA Skimo to get us to that moment,” Smith said. “It was really cool to deliver that.”

While the event was essentially Gibson’s third-career skimo race — and first on the World Cup — the 17-time state champion in cross-country, Nordic skiing and track and field isn’t a stranger to snow sports. She raced on skinny skis and on the Alpine side as a youngster before earning All-American honors at the University of Washington in cross-country running. During college, she occasionally ventured out into the Canadian slopes to touch base with her roots.

“It’s something that I’ve always loved a lot and had always known I might come back to competing in it,” Gibson told NCAA.org earlier this month.

Smith qualified for the 1500-meters at the 2024 U.S. Olympic Trials. A week prior, she won the vertical kilometer at Broken Arrow — one of the most competitive trail running races in the world. Her wide-ranging talents caught Smith’s eye.

“We’ve known each other for four or five years now … so he came up to me at a race that we were at in June and said, ‘Tell me if the answer’s no, and I will never ask you about this again, but you should try skimo.’ And I could not get the idea out of my head,” Gibson told NCAA.org. “I just had this extreme curiosity and excitement about trying it.”

“Nothing Anna does should surprise anyone at this point,” Smith said of his teammate for Saturday’s mixed relay, the second and final skimo event in Italy. “She’s capable of amazing things in whatever she puts her mind to. I just feel like because of the person she is, the athlete she is, she’s especially equipped to handle something like this. Just being calm and positive and someone who always rises to the moment.”

Skimo’s historic roots are deeply European, but it also has ties to the 10th Mountain Division. During World War II, military units trained for mountain warfare and tested tactics on skis along the areas snowy hillsides and challenging peaks surrounding Camp Hale.

The sport entails skiers traveling uphill, free-heel, using skins on the bases to grip the snow. To transition to downhill mode, the skins are removed and boots are locked. In the 1980s, Dynafit invented the “pin binding” which revolutionized the sport from a way to travel from various mountain huts and back to a full-fledged competition.

“It’s taken us about 20 to 25 years to get to where we are today,” Eric Henderson, a longtime ski mountaineer and former agency of record for the United States Ski Mountaineering Association told 5280. “To have a sport that’s actually now in the Olympics — it’s huge.”

Smith hopes the appearance inspires people back home to take up the sport themselves.

“I want people to know it’s something super fun to do. It’s something you can do to get some exercise and fresh air and peace and quiet on the way up and then you have the thrill on the way down,” he said. “If it looks exciting to watch, then I hope people give it a try.”

Thursday’s sprint race contained both an ascent and descent, with the former element presenting itself in three stages. Athletes first navigated a set of switchbacks on skis before removing them and securing them to a backpack to run up a set of steps. After reattaching the skis, they made one final uphill push before ripping off the skins and flying down a six-turn giant slalom-like course to the finish. The duration of the race — roughly 3 1/2 minutes — doesn’t showcase Smith’s strengths as much as longer formats, but he was pleased to represent the country and the sport on an international stage nonetheless.

“So many people worked so hard to make this happen and so many friends and family are here to cheer and it’s just such a special moment to be able to share with the people on the ground here, watching on TV and following from home,” he said. “When I think about all that effort so many people have put into it, yeah I want to give them something to cheer for.”

Gibson felt like she had a wild quarterfinal and was fortunate to sneak into the semis as one of the “lucky losers,” a non-automatic time qualifier.

“My first run felt like a mess if I’m honest. I had a pretty slow start; I went straight to the back,” the 26-year-old said. “And then I also had a pretty messy transition after the foot part and somehow I slammed my finger, so there was just a lot going on and it felt very chaotic.”

“And so coming into the finish line I definitely had this sense of ‘wow, that wasn’t that fast; I didn’t do super well,’ and I went into our team zone and I was like, ‘OK, I think the day might be over for me,'” she continued. “But, the thing that’s great about skimo is that it’s not over until it’s over.”

The Olympic experience isn’t over for either Smith or Gibson either. On Saturday, they’ll try and recreate the magic they found in Utah two months ago.

“Anna and I are going to keep racing all out,” Smith said, looking ahead to the mixed relay. “And just try to surprise people even more.”