Seventy-eight years later, ski mountaineering will once again be an Olympic sport at the Winter Games to be held in 2026 in Milan-Cortina d'Ampezzo (Italy).
The last time it was, in 1948, it wasn't even called mountain skiing yet. It was called military patrol, in reference to its wartime origins, and it was practiced as an exhibition sport with materials that no skier would feel comfortable with today. In 2026 it will be a competitive sport, with professional participants, new rules and materials with the most advanced technology.
Two ski mountaineering competitions will be held at the Games, one sprint and another mixed relay, reports Jordi Canals, secretary general of the International Ski Mountaineering Federation (ISMF) and key person in the organization. Of the tests.
18 men and 18 women, who have not yet been selected, will participate in them. Italy, as the organizing country, is the only one that has two guaranteed places. Spain, with an outstanding level in mountain skiing - although behind France, Italy and Switzerland - has options to have representatives and even win medals.
Looking ahead to the 2030 Games, whose venue has not yet been decided, a third competition of a longer duration could be included, and more similar to the type of mountain skiing that has become popular in recent years in the Pyrenees, in which The participants would go up and down one or several mountains, overcoming a difference in altitude of about 1,500 meters.
“Mountain skiing was Olympic before alpine skiing,” explains Jordi Canals, who speaks to La Vanguardia recently arrived from the general assembly of the International Olympic Committee in Bombay (India). “It had its peak after the First World War, when armies were interested in controlling mountain passes at a time when there were still no helicopters or drones,” explains Canals.
Via ferratas, now converted into mountain recreational activities, were also developed in the First World War, when multiple passes in the Dolomites were equipped with chains and other metal elements to ensure access for soldiers and weapons to strategic positions.
The first appearance of the sport then called military patrol in the Olympic Games was in 1924 in Chamonix, the French town located at the foot of Mont Blanc. In that first edition of the winter games, bobsleigh, hockey, skating and ski jumping competitions were also held, among other disciplines. But not alpine skiing, which had to wait until 1936 to be Olympic.
Teams of four people competed in the military patrol, with an officer with a pistol and three subordinates with rifles, who had to travel about 20 kilometers and overcome differences in altitude of about a thousand meters. They carried backpacks weighing more than 24 kilos and stopped at different points along the route to shoot at supposed enemies. Part of these rules were recovered in the biathlon, Olympic since 1960, which combines cross-country skiing (which is different from mountain skiing) and shooting.
Military patrol was repeated as an exhibition sport in the 1928 Games in St. Moritz (Switzerland), 1932 in Lake Placid (USA) and 1948 (again in St. Moritz). Ski mountaineering then disappeared from the Olympic agenda until the international federation ISMF was founded in 2007.
It was at that time when Jordi Canals entered the scene, who directed the Center for Mountain Skiing Technology in Catalonia and had among his disciples Kilian Jornet and Mireia Miró. With Canals as teacher, both were proclaimed world champions.
A self-taught mountaineer, Canals had started skiing in the mid-70s when he was twenty years old. He skied with leather boots, the same ones he used to climb, and at the end of the day they weighed almost two kilos each due to the amount of water he had soaked in them. He used to go to Núria and La Molina, where he could reach by train from Barcelona. Since he had not yet had the opportunity to practice alpine skiing and started from scratch, “he went down doing double laps because he didn't know how to do it any other way,” he remembers.
He soon learned. He began competing in 1978 and was on the podium 53 times in national and international competitions until 1990. His dedication to the mountains did not prevent him from finishing two degrees, first Chemistry and then Biology, at a time when it was not common to take double degrees, and he worked for three years in a nuclear medicine laboratory at the Hospital Clínic, manipulating radioisotopes to perform scintigraphy. But he changed the laboratory for teaching to be able to combine work with the mountains, his true passion, which allowed him to participate in expeditions to Everest and K2 - among other peaks - and dedicate himself more to skiing.
The international federation made a first attempt to have mountain skiing present at the 2014 Sochi Games. It was not achieved for Sochi or Pieongchang four years later. The conversations with the IOC bore fruit in 2021, when ski mountaineering was finally recognized as an Olympic sport, which did not allow it to enter the program for the 2022 Games but did allow it to enter the 2026 Games.
The competition will be held in the Bormio ski resort, the same one that will host the alpine skiing tests.
In the sprint category, which is scheduled to be held on Thursday, February 19, the 36 participants will have to overcome a route with 70 meters of unevenness, in which they will have to make several transitions, removing and putting seal skins on the bottom of their skis. -the maneuver that is so difficult for those who are starting out in mountain skiing-. There will be qualifying races and a final, with six participants in each one.
In the mixed relay category, scheduled for Saturday the 21st, 18 teams made up of a man and a woman of the same nationality will participate. The route will be longer and the difference in altitude will be 140 meters in each lap of the circuit, also with mandatory transitions for all participants.
Since they will not pass through areas at risk of avalanches, it will not be necessary for them to carry an Avalanche Victim Detector (AVD), an essential safety instrument for mountain skiing fans.
The mixed relay competitors will be the same as the sprint competitors. It is planned to select them with a double criterion: geographic so that federations from all continents can be represented; and depending on the results that skiers from each continent have achieved in previous competitions.
On the Spanish side, the main candidates to participate in the Games include the Catalan Oriol Cardona Coll (gold medal in sprint at this year's World Cup); the Basque Íñigo Martínez de Albornoz (sixth in sprint and fourth in mixed relay at the World Cup); the Andalusian Ana Alonso Rodríguez; and the Catalan Marta Garcia Farrés.
