In the unlikely event that Cam Smith forgets he’s going to the Olympics this year, his colleagues in Crested Butte are eager to remind him of his newly earned status on the international sporting stage.
Smith will be competing in ski mountaineering during the 2026 Winter Olympics in Italy in February after winning the World Cup event in December. Since then, he’s returned to work at the Crested Butte Adaptive Sports Center, where his colleagues are excited about the acclaim he’s brought to the office.
“Everyone's excited about it. But yeah, it's definitely coming in small bits of realization of what this all means,” Smith said.
Ski mountaineering, also known as skimo, is making its Olympic debut at the 2026 games. The sport demands athletes ski up a mountain on specialty skis that allow for climbing and then ski back down after making a quick change to the equipment.
“It's kind of like adding these F1 pit stops into a ski race where you're going up and down the mountain,” Smith said, likening a Formula 1 stop to the equipment transition component of ski mountaineering.
Smith, who grew up a proficient distance runner in Rockford, Illinois, came to ski mountaineering after moving to Gunnison to attend Western Colorado University.
“I liked skiing growing up. It just wasn't my biggest passion in life. We would drive a few hours to some cold, icy Midwest resort and have a little fun and go back, and I was like, yeah, that was okay,” he said.
But after moving to Gunnison to attend Western and having access to Crested Butte, Smith really took to the sport. “We'd go to class in the morning and then hop on the bus with all of our friends and go ski at Crested Butte all afternoon,” which made him realize, ”Wow, skiing's great.”
Initially, Smith said he just wanted to get good enough to finish events like The Grand Traverse, a ski race from Crested Butte to Aspen covering roughly 40 miles and climbing nearly 7,000 vertical feet. As he developed an aptitude for the sport, he rose in the competitive ranks. It just so happened that his rise in the sport coincided with international discussions to add it to the Olympic Games.
“In 2021, they announced that skimo would be in the Olympics for ‘26,” Smith said, who was 25 at the time. “I thought, okay, five years from now we'll have our chance.”
Smith secured that chance in December when he and his relay partner, Anna Gibson of Wyoming, took World Cup Gold at Solitude Mountain Resort. Smith will compete in the relay event as well as an individual sprint event.
The races are considerably shorter than the lengthy skimo races like The Grand Traverse. Instead of dozens of miles and thousands of feet, the race sends skiers up a few hundred feet of climbing and then back down a run. In between, racers must navigate the transitions from skiing uphill to running uphill and finally to skiing back down.
“There's going to be a lot of changes, a lot of back and forth, and it’s not necessarily like one athlete can dominate from the front,” Smith said.
The skimo events for the Olympics are scheduled for Feb. 19 and 21, with the individual sprint races taking place on the 19th and the longer, mixed relay set for the 21st. Smith said it’s been an adjustment going from Olympic hopeful to Olympian, but he’s already started the process of learning a little Italian and setting his sights on the next benchmark.
“We're definitely going there to hunt for a medal, and that's absolutely the goal,” Smith said.
