Anna Gibson and Cam Smith Race To Fourth In Olympic Debut of Ski Mountaineering Mixed Relay

The U.S. pair, who only began competing together in recent months, finished just 17.39 seconds off the podium.

Anna Gibson and Cam Smith needed until the final opportunity to qualify for the Olympic debut of ski mountaineering. On Saturday, the U.S. duo capped off the Olympic Winter Games Milano Cortina 2026 with a thrilling fourth-place finish in the mixed relay event.

After four grueling laps at the Stelvio Ski Centre in Bormio, Italy, Smith crossed the finish line in 27 minutes, 40.43 seconds, coming just 17.39 seconds shy of the podium.

France won the gold medal in 26:57.44, followed by Switzerland and Spain.

“We just showed that we can compete with the top nations,” Smith said. “We’ve been a team for a few months, and we were a few seconds from the podium. The sky’s the limit for the U.S.”

Ski mountaineering, in which athletes scale up and down a snowy course, became the first entirely new sport added to the Winter Games since skeleton in 2002.

Gibson, 26, picked up the sport known as “skimo” in only a few months.

An accomplished mountain runner from Jackson, Wyoming, she tried ski mountaineering for the first time last summer at the encouragement of Smith, a 13-time national champion in the sport. Gibson, a former Nordic skier, learned fast. She and Smith clinched their spots in the Games in December, after they won the mixed relay race at a world cup event in Utah.

“We’re thrilled to have made it here,” said Smith, 30, who grew up in Rockford, Illinois, but now lives in Crested Butte, Colorado. “We’ve been underdogs since day one, and we’ve just embraced that ‘why not us’ mentality.”

Gibson and Smith both took part in the individual sprint event on Thursday, with each reaching the semifinal round. Considered dark horses in the 12-team relay field on Sunday, the Americans more than held their own against the established European powers.

In the mixed relay, athletes alternate over four laps, starting with the female. The Bormio course included two ascents and two descents on each lap, as well as a “bootpack” section in which athletes climbed a set of stairs on foot while carrying their skis on their back. All told, the course covered 1,410 meters with 137 meters of elevation gain.

Gibson opened with a strong first leg to hand off to Smith in fifth place. Smith then stuck with the main chase group until moving up to fourth at the second transition point.

With France and Switzerland racing ahead, the race turned into a three-way contest for bronze.

Despite dropping one of her poles on the stairs, Gibson quickly recovered and edged her way into third place at the final transition. The U.S., Spain and Italy entered the final lap within one second of each other.

“To be honest, I don’t think either of us were focused on (medals) in the middle of the race,” Gibson said. “It was so much concentration just to kind of check out of all the energy and focus on the very simple tasks at hand that we practiced over and over and over again.”

Spain’s Oriol Cardona Coll, who won the men’s sprint on Thursday, pulled away from the others early in the third lap, building enough of a buffer to cruise to a bronze medal even with his team incurring a three-second penalty on one of its transitions.

Smith created separation of his own, finishing nearly 18 seconds ahead of Italy.

“I think it shows that the moment wasn’t too big for us,” Smith said. “We didn’t feel the need to press early on, we just trusted each other to do our jobs and trusted our own pacing and our own strategy to move up through the race. And I think that helped us handle the pressure of the moment really well, and we did as well as we possibly could have.”

Several minutes after the race, Gibson described the experience as “a blur.”

“I could not give you a race play-by-play and tell you what position we were in or what even happened, or which transitions were good or bad,” she said. “I was in a state of the most extreme concentration I have ever been in.”

The result of all the team’s preparation was a breakthrough on the sport’s biggest stage.

“I think this entire season feels like a huge surprise to everyone,” Gibson said. “So I just think it’s a testament to the fact that no one ever knows what’s going to happen. That’s why we do the race. We were here to play, and today I think we showed that. We were up in a fantastic position, contending for a medal.”

Chrös McDougall has covered the Olympic and Paralympic Movement for TeamUSA.com since 2009 on behalf of Red Line Editorial, Inc. He is based in Minneapolis-St. Paul.