How Two Trail Runners Earned a Spot in the 2026 Winter Olympics

While there has been talk about adding trail running to Summer Olympics in the future and possibly including cross country running in the Winter Olympics somewhere down the road, neither of those are certain yet. So far, just a lot of talk and wishful thinking.

However, a brief but specific discussion at last summer’s Broken Arrow Skyrace was the catalyst for a stunning Olympic scenario that’s about to come to life in mid-February.

On December 6, American athletes Cameron Smith and Anna Gibson earned a stunning victory in the mixed relay race at the ISMF Ski Mountaineering World Cup event in Solitude, Utah, earning the first-ever U.S. gold medal in a Skimo World Cup and securing a spot for Team USA in the Milano-Cortina Winter Olympics in February. 

While it was made possible by each athlete’s considerable skillsets, dedication to training, and fierce competitiveness, it was astonishing—especially given that it was only the second skimo race ever for Gibson.

But the Olympic dream never would have come true if Smith hadn’t boldly asked Gibson if she was interested and willing to give skimo a try.

After she won the women’s 2.5-mile Ascent race at Broken Arrow on June 20 and he placed third among the men, he asked her if she was interested, but immediately said that he wouldn’t bug her again if she wasn’t. She was all-in.

“Given her background in skiing and her uphill running ability, she’s literally the perfect prototype for this sport,” Smith says. “If there was anyone in the world I could have as a teammate, it would be Anna Gibson. I was like, ‘I know you have a professional running career with Brooks and like you have this whole style all sorted out for yourself, but if there’s any way you would ever dream of making this happen, you’re kind of my perfect teammate.’ And then she jumped on board.” 

Running to the Top

The athletic origin stories of Gibson and Smith couldn’t be more different, but the commonality they shared before suddenly becoming Olympic skiers was their emergence as world-class trail runners and an uncanny knack for trying new sports.

A little more than two months before they partnered for a World Cup win on skis, Gibson placed third in the 6K uphill race and 13th in the 14K mountain race at the 2025 World Mountain and Trail Running Championships in Canfranc, Spain, in September, while Smith was 11th in the uphill race and 24th in the mountain race. 

Smith, a 30-year-old professional trail runner and skier for Dynafit, has been one of the best skimo racers in U.S. for the past several years—he was the first North American male athlete to earn a skimo World Cup podium finish four years ago—but Gibson, a 26-year-old professional trail runner for Brooks since 2023, is perhaps best described as an extremely skilled rookie at skimo, given her long and distinguished background in various skiing disciplines.

“It’s funny because I think a lot of people on the outside who don’t know me hear this story and they think that it’s really wild, but people who have known me my whole life are like, ‘Oh, this makes total sense,’” Gibson said. “I’ve always loved to ski, and at one point I was convinced that my sport. I wanted to be an Olympic downhill ski racer. I haven’t done skimo races, but it involves a lot of skills that I have already had, and that I use very often just applied in a new context.”

Gibson grew up skiing competitively in winter sports hotbed of Jackson, Wyoming. She was initially a fast junior downhill ski racer but later switched to cross country skiing and became a nine-time All-American at the U.S. Junior Nordic Nationals, which included a 2017 national title in the 10K classic race. She eventually turned out to be an even better track and cross country runner, winning five Wyoming state titles as a senior in high school before later becoming an All-American 1500-meter runner on the track for the University of Washington. 

An athlete known for having the unique blend of ferocious intensity, raw power, uncanny endurance, and unconstrained joy, Gibson has rarely met a challenge she hasn’t engaged in all-out.

Smith, meanwhile, was primarily a track and cross country runner growing up in pancake flat Rockford, Illinois. He also learned to ski as a kid, but he would only occasionally hit the slopes for fun on the small ski hills of southern Wisconsin and northwestern Illinois. While he was a good runner in high school, when he headed west and followed his older sister to Western Colorado University in Gunnison, Colorado, he didn’t compete for the Mountaineers nationally ranked cross country or track teams. Instead, he quickly took an interest in numerous mountain-based endurance sports and within his first year in school found himself competing in trail running, mountain biking, Nordic skiing, and, eventually, skimo events.

Oddly enough, Smith didn’t finish his first skimo race—the 40-mile, two-person Grand Traverse race from Crested Butte to Aspen he entered with his sister—and he finished near the back of the back in that event the following year. But those early experiences whet his appetite for the sport and his interest in training for endurance events. Along the way, he earned a degree in exercise science and became a meticulous self-coached athlete guided both by scientific training principles, and a rather mild-mannered approach to his daily well-being.

That combination would help him to not only go on to win the Grand Traverse in 2018 (with teammate Sean Van Horn), but also win the event’s triple crown series that combines the summertime trail running and mountain biking races on the same course. Although still in its infancy in the U.S. and not yet an Olympic sport, skimo racing became Smith’s main jam, the sport he wanted to specialize in. He went on to win numerous regional events like the 24-mile Power of Four in Aspen and the 23.5-mile Gothic Mountain Tour in Crested Butte, as well as his first two U.S. national championship races in 2020.

By the winter of 2021-2022, he became the first North American male to finish on the podium of a World Cup race when he placed third in an event in Andorra, and later won the vertical and individual races of the IMSF North American Championships at Kicking Horse Mountain Resort in Canada.

He suffered a torn ACL and damaged meniscus in a race in 2023 and an injured a shoulder in 2024, limiting his skiing in back to back winters. But he he came back healthy, strong and inspired again last winter and won a big race in Tignes, France, and a month later won another U.S. national title in the vertical race at the Wasatch Powder Keg in Utah, which put him back on track to chase to pursue his Olympic dream.

Skimo racing has been an organized international sport since 1988, but it didn’t get elevated to an Olympic sport until 2021, when the International Olympic Committee (IOC) approved its inclusion for its debut the 2026 Winter Olympics. Olympic qualifying was set up through the World Cup circuit, with six races available last winter in Europe and one more this winter in Utah.

There are many strong American women emerging in the sport—including Hali Hafeman who Smith teamed with to win the mixed relay at the 2025 U.S. championships—but knowing the U.S. was on the bubble heading into the coming winter, Smith didn’t want to leave any stone unturned for the final Olympic qualifying opportunity. He decided to approach Gibson at last summer’s Broken Arrow Skyrace because, although she lacked experience in skimo racing, she has many other skills that he thought would make her competitive.

“She’s an amazing skier with amazing uphill running abilities and a fast track running background that really align with how short and intense these races are,” Smith said. “It’s just an insane combo. Knowing that she’s so capable and high-performing at all these different sports kind of shows the athlete that she is and has the ability and willingness to learn new things.”

While Gibson was concerned she might lack the technical skills and speed that many elite European competitors have—especially when it comes to quickly tearing off skins and putting them back on at transition areas between uphill skiing and uphill bootpack hiking sessions—skimo is a sport she had earnestly wanted to try for years. (The only other skimo race she had ever done before the World Cup race was the Mount Bachelor VertFest in 2023, which, by the way, she also won.)

“When I got into running in middle school and high school, I switched over to Nordic skiing because I kind of was realizing that I was more of an endurance athlete, and that was sort of where my passion was,” Gibson said. “But I kept downhill skiing for fun, and then I started doing more stuff in the backcountry. Back then, I was training on skis going up mountains during the winter quite a lot and running only a handful of times per week. I kind of got interested in skimo a little bit, but I just didn’t race. I had a skimo setup and would go out and do some fast uphill laps inbounds on groomed terrain. But all along my interest grew, but I didn’t pull the trigger until Cam approached me at Broken Arrow.”

From Trail to Snow

Both Smith and Gibson focused on trail running through the world championships in September, they weren’t actually on skis together until a U.S. team training camp in Utah two weeks before the World Cup race. 

But with little early season snow, the selection race for the mixed relay team was reduced to a series of three individual uphill time trials. Each session was about 10 minutes in duration and included going through transitions—taking skins off, putting them on—then walking down the mountain to do it two more times. 

Smith and Gibson were the top performers in those three time trials, which made it easy for the U.S. Skimo National Team to choose them for the relay and for everyone else to rally around them the in the World Cup race.

Going into the race, the U.S. was ranked 13^th with only the top 12 teams going to the Olympics. But in the qualifying round of the Utah World Cup, Smith finished at the top of the men’s field while Gibson came in third, providing a hint of what was to come the next day.

Up against teams from 12 other countries in the mixed relay, Gibson found herself in a tight group leaving the gate on the first lap and managed to finish her first two climbs in sixth place. But her surprisingly strong transitions between skins and skis allowed her to make the handoff to Smith in fourth place.

Smith quickly pushed past a Canadian team into third place. On his second climb, he saw an opportunity to challenge the leaders, and that was all he needed. He took a commanding lead in an uphill boot pack section and never looked back. At the second handoff, Gibson was 30 seconds ahead of the pack. When Smith crossed the finish line after 32:17 of their combined racing efforts, the their lead had grown to 51 seconds.

“Cam basically just opened up the door for this at Broken Arrow, and I could not stop thinking about it for the next week after that,” Gibson said. “And so I kind of went through the process of just talking with staff on the U.S. team and understanding more about how it would look. And then I talked to my coach, David Roche, just to make sure that everything would be good with training. But ultimately, I could not get the idea out of my head. I was like, ‘OK, I think I have to do this. I just felt like it was time for me to venture into the skimo world.”

Roche says he isn’t surprised in the least that Gibson has found instant success in skimo racing and thinks she’s just scratched the surface of how good she can be. In addition to her considerable physical talents and skills, he thinks her amenable mental outlook has also played a big role.

“She is just a remarkable, one-of-a-kind human, and I think that’s an essential part of her athletic journey,” Roche says. “And that’s the only reason she can hop into a sport and immediately do this. Because even if you have all the physical tools and the talent and the training, the mindset of stepping up into the most high-pressure situation you could ever imagine is a huge challenge for most people, and she’s just like, ‘Oh, well, here’s a fun adventure.’” 

On to the Olympics

Although they’re Olympic teammates in a combined event, Gibson and Smith haven’t been training together in the lead-up to the Olympics. In fact, they won’t reunite until late January for another World Cup mixed relay race in Spain just before the opening ceremonies of the Olympics on February 6 in Milan, Italy. Gibson has continued training in Jackson, while Smith has been in Crested Butte, although he is planning to head to Europe in early January for two additional World Cup races in France and Andorra. After the opening ceremonies, they’ll spend time training together away from the Olympic venue until a few days before their Olympic race on February 21.

During the trail running season, Roche says Gibson runs 50 to 60 miles per week, and also rides a bike two or three times per week. This winter in the lead-up to the Olympics, she’s dialed back her running by a day because she’s been skiing and cycling almost every day trying to maintain the speed and top-end power she honed in trail running. The strength and power she develops riding is part of her secret sauce, says Roche, who believes Gibson is strong enough on the bike that she could be a pro tour ride or a professional gravel cyclist.

“If you stay fast and powerful, all aerobic work (for both sports) goes into the same bucket for the most part,” Roche says. “Anna can go out and do three- or four-hour bike rides, and that’s an advantage that pure runners don’t have. They can’t go out and do that without breaking down, or at least, getting slower. And at the end of these bike rides, we’ll throw in 5 x 30 seconds hard to work on an element of fatigue resistance that no runner can really practice in the same way. Anna just does Anna things and shows up with that great mindset she has, and it’s kind of magical what happens.”

Up until recently, Smith has been more of a long endurance specialist, both as a skier and as a trail runner. But knowing the Winter Olympics would only include relatively short and fast racing—the men’s and women’s individual sprint races and the mixed relay—he retooled his training over the past two winners to incorporate quicker intervals and raced in shorter and faster trail races to tune up his fitness for the coming ski season.

After the trail running season and before there was enough snow to do specific skimo workouts, he incorporated a lot of uphill rollerski workouts on dry pavement, uphill treadmill workouts while wearing ankle weights, steep hiking efforts with his ski poles, and big leg workouts in the gym. (Listen to this Training Peaks podcast with Smith as he talks about his trail running and skimo training.)

To simulate the pace and power needed for a skimo race, Smith downloaded the profile of a race course with a 15 percent incline from the previous winter and, wearing ankle weights that weighed exactly what his boots, bindings and skis weigh, put the treadmill up to the same grade and ran with the same stride cadence as the fastest World Cup skiers.

“I took that race and then I looked at what pace the leaders were doing in the fastest times of the day on that section of the race,” he said. “I did the warmups on the treadmill, accumulating a little bit of work at that exact intensity, and then I was taking seven-minute breaks between everything, which is about the amount of time that you have to rest while your teammates racing in the mixed relay, then I’d go outside and then switch to repeated intervals every minute on the minute with the ankle weights and poles on this grassy hill right outside the gym. And so those were my fundamental workouts for a lot of this build.”

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