Competitors In The Newest Olympic Sport Will Scale Extraordinary Heights Of Suffering

There's all kinds of stuff happening in this here second week of the Olympics, from Norwegians Scandinavianly wandering into the forest, to various Olympians cozymaxxing, to this Italian short track speedskater guy I saw finish two races backwards, once on accident and once on purpose. But despite the glut, I am mostly looking forward to the forthcoming Olympic debut of one of the most painful sports imaginable: ski mountaineering, or skimo.

The competitive premise of ski mountaineering is essentially that cross country skiing, already one of the most lung-intensive sports on the planet, presents an insufficient test of its athletes cardiovascular limits. It is as if organizers looked at the otherworldly abilities of Johannes Klæbo (and the howling misery of Jessie Diggins), and conceived of a way to introduce more suffering. "I think they are the athletes who have the highest pain threshold and can really suffer," German skimo physician Dr. Volker Schöffl told NBC. "They sprint, they run and then, you know, gradually everybody is dying around you until one man is standing and finishing first."

You can think of skimo as a sort of triathlon that combines cross-country skiing, regular-style skiing, and trail running. Competitors first ski uphill with the help of adhesive climbing skins on the front of their skis, then peel the skins from their skis and descend back to the bottom again. Now the competitors repeat the climb, but in a more difficult way: For the second climb, the athletes stow their skis in their backpacks and run up the hill in their boots. They then descend again.