Ski mountaineering is the hot new event at the Olympics—and it’s changing everything about ski gear

The 2026 Milan-Cortino Winter Olympics is set to debut a new sport: ski mountaineering, also known as skimo. Over the course of two days at the Stelvio Ski Centre located in Bormio, Italy, 36 athletes will compete in three main events: men’s sprints, women’s sprints, and mixed relay. 

The race is part endurance and speed, as typical skimo competitions feature athletes racing against each other as they ascend uphill with support of climbing skins before skiing downhill. The Winter Olympics version, however, differs in format. This version compresses the competition into a roughly three-minute race.  

Each leg of a skimo race requires its own specialized equipment. And that equipment matters. Who wins and loses in skimo is often a matter of milliseconds, determined during the transitions between the three distinct moments of the race: ascent, boot-packing (mountaineering), and descent.

That’s where a 76 year-old German company comes in. Dynafit created the DNA Sprint Collection, a six-product line engineered specifically for the Olympic stage that 11 out of 36  athletes will use during the competition. The remaining athletes will use similar equipment provided by different brands in line with the International Ski Mountaineering Federation’s (ISMF) requirements. 

Dynafit’s Design Philosophy 

A typical skimo competition features rough, high alpine terrain and harsh, snowy conditions that are physically demanding on athletes. To maneuver this challenging terrain, athletes rely on gear such as skis, boots, poles, gloves, backpacks (to hold equipment while transitioning from one part of the race to the other), crampons (a spike attachment for athletes boots to grip onto ice while on foot), and avalanche gear. All of this gear is specifically designed to be lightweight to assist athletes in navigating the challenging, mountainous terrain. 

Historically, Dynafit is known for pioneering the boots and tech binding (a mechanism that lets athletes lift their heel while climbing uphill and lock into place to descend downhill) critical for performing the sport. Now, as the dominant brand in the $1.24 billion skimo equipment market, the company produces a range of products, including helmets, race suits, boots, skis, and skins, for the casual and elite skier. 

“ The biggest challenge in our development [is] to find the balance between weight and safety,” says Manuel Aumann, Dynafit’s Operations and R&D Director Bindings. Aumann explains that the company has an abundance of testing experience to ensure their products’ durability and safety.

“We have to save every gram . . . but also [deliver] high safety products,” explains Aumann. “[For] every 100 grams you save on your boot or the ski, or on the binding, you could carry seven times more weight on the backpack. For our customers and for the athletes, [that] pushes them to the next level.”

Re-Thinking Skimo Designs

This will not be the first time that skimo qualifies as a Winter Olympic sport. Between 1924 and 1936, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) included skimo in the Winter Games but later discontinued it in part due to its dangerous nature. Then in July 2021, the IOC unanimously approved skimo’s inclusion in the 2026 Winter Olympics. 

For the occasion, Dynafit developed a unique line specific for the Olympics, including skis, bindings, poles, gloves, and backpacks. Creating a line of products to help elevate athletes’ performance involved a two-step process. 

First, in 2022, Dynafit hosted an international summit with 25 of its sponsored athletes to curate their feedback on equipment constraints. That input served as the foundation for the company’s four-year process from the redesign to market availability of its specialty product line. 

Aumann and his team dissected the Olympic format to inform their design process. The Olympic race focuses on sprint races. Athletes will be required to complete an uphill ascent on skis, transition into a short bootpacking section, then transition again for a downhill descent. This race format requires fast transitions between each phase. 

“The two minutes 30, you can split [in] time slots,” says Aumann. The rough estimation [is] two minutes for the uphill and 30 seconds for the downhill. We got into the analysis of where we can have the most benefit if we change something.”

The team determined that the first half of the race, involving the ascent with skis and the transition where athletes remove their skis and place them into their backpacks just before continuing onto bootpacking (a foot race on skis with the assistance of poles), would yield the most benefit. 

The Dynafit team learned that while most of the new product line required minimal adjustments, their skis and bindings would require significant design alterations.  

“The handling operations, they’re quite important on this high level,” explains Aumann. “It’s really about the second[s] they can save during [these] transitions.”  

The rough alpine terrain of a standard skimo competition requires skis to have increased “skiability,” meaning they are carved and built for those conditions in order for athletes to make safe turns. Since the Olympics course will have smoother slopes with fewer steep curves and banked turns to help athletes, it allows skis to have less “skiability.” In other words, the skis do not need to be optimized for tough terrains, allowing Aumann and his team to focus on narrowing the ski-waist from 64 mm to 61 mm. 

“With this [slimmer] ski, we could save weight,” says Aumann. While a traditional race touring ski weighs 690 grams, the altered ski weighs only 650 grams. 

Another benefit of this slimmer version of the ski, particularly its narrower tail, is that it allows athletes to better handle transitions. For instance, when athletes move from skiing uphill to bootpacking, they must quickly loop their skis onto their backpack for the foot race and then later unhook them for the descent downhill. Ultimately, this design change is intended to help athletes shave off incremental seconds, which is critical in a sprint where every tenth of a second counts.

Further, during the uphill transition from skis to bootpacking (the foot race), athletes will need to release themselves from their ski bindings, where steel pins meet the boot inserts to secure the boots within the binding. Then on the descent portion of the course, athletes need to step back into their ski bindings. The act of stepping in and out of skis presented additional time-saving opportunities and speed optimization. Aumann and his team made three key design changes to their fully aluminum, binding product.

“What we did is to really make [the grip zone], where the athlete can grab, wider,” explains Aumann. [The athletes] don’t have to look down, but can grab it in a very easy way without looking.” The team widened the grip zone for the heel piece as well as the locking lever of the binding. Providing athletes with a larger grip zone surface allows athletes to use one hand to release their boots from the binding, saving at least a few tenths of a second. 

Lastly, the team redesigned its ski race stoppers, a safety feature required by the ISMF. Generally, standard ski touring stoppers deploy a small metal arm, or wire, into the snow to slow the ski if an athlete loses it or releases from the binding. According to Aumann, each stopper includes a plastic cap at the end to help it grip and fix into the snow. While a traditional alpine ski touring stopper features sharp contours and edges that can easily snag on a loop in an athletes’ backpack, Dynafit’s re-designed stopper lacks these features. 

Rather, the team modified the transition point where the plastic cap meets a metal wire by creating a smooth, rounded curve surface. By rounding out the curve, the updated design reduces the risk of catching onto other surfaces while improving overall reliability, all without adding weight. The modified race stopper alone weighs just 30 grams, compared to the 70 to 100 grams typical of standard touring models.

Another important aspect of the redesign is that the stopper automatically retracts when athletes switch to the descend/downhill model, eliminating an additional step for manual adjustment.  

Aumann acknowledges that this design process helped accelerate a trend already happening across the industry. As the sport has grown in the past couple of years, manufacturers have increasingly considered tradeoffs rather than focusing solely on making lighter products.

“Within the last two years that [has] changed,” says Aumann. “Perfect handling of the products [is] a very high priority. So, it is [acceptable] to have a product with a few [more] grams if the handling is better and can save time.” Dynafit has already begun incorporating these design tweaks into its commercial products.