Ski mountaineering, ice climbing, cyclo-cross on snow … These events which could see the light of day at the Winter Olympics – Liberation

As the Beijing 2022 Games come to an end, several sports federations are discussing with the IOC with the aim of integrating the winter Olympic scene in the more or less short term.

Will it soon be the turn of the Winter Games to innovate? The recent bets of climbing, surfing, skateboarding and the upcoming appearance of breaking on the scene of the Paris 2024 Summer Games may well have given some ideas to the International Olympic Committee (IOC), always anxious to conquer new public buildings and to modernize its winter counterpart. The Lausanne-based body had done so three decades earlier, when it successfully integrated mogul skiing in 1992, followed by snowboarding from 1998 with giant slalom and half pipe. Conclusive tests, which had then led to the appearance of other satellite events, such as skicross, slopestyle or more recently big air.

So much so that in Beijing, a small quarter of the 109 scheduled events are devoted to snowboarding (11) and freestyle skiing (13). It’s hard to imagine new sports carving out such a place so quickly among the fifteen permanent Olympic sports at the Winter Olympics. Some may however aspire to a start of destiny in the prestigious competition.

Ski mountaineering from 2026

It is already established, since the 138th session of the IOC last summer, that ski mountaineering, recognized as an Olympic discipline in 2016, will make its debut as an additional sport in 2026 in Milan-Cortina (Italy), after a first successful experience at the 2020 Youth Olympic Games. This mountain sport consists of climbing and descending off-piste routes on light skis equipped with skins. Ski touring competition version, in short. Acclaimed by the Italian organizers, it will include five events (women’s and men’s sprints, women’s and men’s individual races, and mixed relay), with “a quota of 48 athletes (24 men and 24 women) falling within the overall quota of 2,900 athletes”, specifies the IOC.

The individual event pits the competitors against each other on a route comprising 1,500 meters of elevation gain, while the sprint is carried out over 80 meters, the best times flirting with three minutes (compared to an hour and a half to two hours for the individual). Each of the events takes place in several qualifying rounds, with eighths, quarters, halves, and a final. As a result, additional chances of medals. What’s more for France: among women, the Frenchwoman Axelle Gachet-Mollaret holds the big globe 2021, while in the men’s table, Thibault Anselmet is in 2nd place in the general classification of the World Cup.

Ice climbing is growing in popularity

Could ski mountaineering pave the way for other disciplines, such as ice climbing? Also called ice climbing, it has been around since the turn of the 1970s. Using the classic mountaineering gear (ice axes, crampons), you have to climb icy walls as quickly as possible. In recent years, the discipline has been gaining popularity. The International Union of Mountaineering Associations (UIAA) believes “around 10 million people who go to the mountain to climb”. Including 6,000 in France, according to the French Federation of Alpine and Mountain Clubs (FFCAM). A fundamental asset to claim to be on the list of Olympic events, one of the criteria required by the IOC for any new sport being that it is supposed to be “widely practiced throughout the world”.

With this solid base of practitioners, the sport knocked on the door of the IOC with more and more insistence, by submitting to the authority its two tests: speed (ice wall) and difficulty (plywood wall). . In the speed test, the best take between six and seven seconds to climb a tower ranging from 15 to 18 meters.

After being rejected for the 2028 Youth Olympic Games, the UIAA hopes to enter the Games in 2030. “Our sport has evolved a lot to now offer competitions in “dry-tooling” [sur des zones sèches, sans glace, type contreplaqué, ndlr], recalled just before the Games Rob Adie, in charge of ice climbing at the UIAA. We must evolve again to put more ice back into our sport, while keeping the technical difficulties,” he acknowledges, however. Between 200 and 250 athletes evolve on the world circuits, many from South Korea, Russia, Switzerland and France, for whom the integration of the discipline could well be good news.

Women’s Nordic combined while waiting for cyclo-cross on snow?

In the meantime, the IOC could be tempted to aggregate other events, with a view to closing a more pressing file: sporting equality between men and women. In China, two women’s events (monobob and big air freestyle skiing) and four mixed events made their Olympic debut. Amenities that make Beijing 2022 the winter edition with the largest number of events for women ever organised. This year, skating emulated the International Biathlon Union (IBU) and the World Curling Federation (WCF), which had already achieved gender parity in their Olympic programme. The Nordic combined remains the only one still exclusively male.

The International Ski Federation (FIS) has long justified this anomaly due to the lack of practitioners, but the “combined” have had their World Cup since 2020 and joined the World Championship program a year later. “The women’s Nordic combined is off to a good start. It is the only discipline not yet “gender balanced”. We hope it will pass,” confirms the secretary general of the FIS, the Frenchman Michel Vion. From 2026? Nothing prevents it. The full program for the next Winter Games will be determined by the IOC Executive Board in June 2022.

This appetite of the IOC for mixed formats (four of the seven new events in Beijing are mixed) could encourage the IBU to offer the single mixed relay in biathlon, which already opposes male-female duos in the World Cup and Worlds.

On the ice side, the International Hockey Federation (IIHF) would think about proposing a three against three version, as basketball did for the Summer Olympics. Especially if the Olympics were to return to North America in 2030 (Vancouver and Salt Lake City are currently candidates, along with Barcelona and Sapporo). There remains a proposal that regularly arises in Belgium and the Netherlands, where this sport is very popular: cyclo-cross, whose seasonal calendar coincides with winter sports.

To seduce the IOC, the International Cycling Union (UCI) organized a World Cup round on December 12 on a snowy course in Val di Sole (in northern Italy). For a result in line with expectations: a victory for Belgian Wout van Aert, one of the current monsters in the discipline. Discussions on the subject do exist at the IOC. Discussions in which the president of the UCI, the French deputy David Lappartient, president of the body since 2017, risks taking part.