(Photo credit: REUTERS/Angelika Warmuth)

BORMIO, Italy -- Ski mountaineering is ready for its Olympic debut, starting with the men's and women's sprint events on Thursday. It does so in a mountain region rich with the sport's history.

HOW IT WORKS

Ski mountaineering, known as SkiMo, is a sport that combines ascending up mountainous terrain and skiing back down. The condensed version, the sprint event, will feature at the Winter Games, taking around three minutes per heat.

With three rounds, from heats to finals, and 36 athletes competing in total, each ski mountaineer will have to complete their race in three parts: an uphill trek on skis with 'skins' underneath which grip the snow, a walk up stairs on foot where the skis are stowed into a backpack, known as boot-packing, and finally a ski down to the finish line, which might include some jumps or rolls built into the snow.

With the transitions between each stage being a key part of winning the competition, it is a race against the clock as the first athlete across the finish line wins.

There will also be a mixed gender relay with one man and one woman per team competing together to complete two rounds each on Saturday.

LONG HISTORY, FAMILIAL TIES IN BORMIO

Not only does SkiMo's history trace back hundreds of years to Alpine military training, it also has a lot of rich history specific to its Olympic host location.

'It's kind of where ski mountaineering racing came to life,' Michela Martinelli, sport manager of ski mountaineering for Milan Cortina, said of the Alpine region surrounding Bormio, which boasts many successful SkiMo athletes and a leading ski manufacturer for the sport.

SkiMo evolved largely in the 1980s when recreational races started to appear, its first World Championships being held in 2002 in Serre Chevalier, France. In 2022 it was adopted into the Youth Olympic Games before being added for Milan Cortina.

Two of the competing Italian athletes, Giulia Murada and Michele Boscacci, are from the surrounding region and both have their fathers helping to prepare the Olympic course.

Their fathers, Ivan Murada and Graziano Boscacci, are themselves decorated ski mountaineers. Together they won the team race at the first ever World Championship, playing a large part in Italy's success in the sport.

WHO TO WATCH OUT FOR

France's Emily Harrop will be defending her world No. 1 ranking in the women's sprint from last year while Spain's Oriol Cardona Coll will be defending his own.

They face tough competition from racers such as Switzerland's Marianne Fatton and Jon Kistler, and France's Thibault Anselmet, who won the most recent World Cup men's sprint race earlier in February in Spain.

The French duo, Harrop and Anselmet, who won the mixed relay at the same event, will be competing not only against Spain and Switzerland but also against married couple Michele Boscacci and Alba de Silvestro from Italy and hopeful newcomers Anna Gibson and Cam Smith from the United States.

--Reuters, special to Field Level Media