MILAN — Anna Gibson and Jadin O’Brien vied for spots on a Summer Olympic team in 2024, but their Olympic debuts will come at the Milan Cortina Winter Games on Thursday and Friday.
Gibson, a 26-year-old from Jackson, Wyoming, will be the first American to compete in the new Winter Olympic sport of ski mountaineering.
In skimo, athletes race up and down a course and alternate between being on skis and on foot (with their skis attached to their backs). Medals will be awarded in women’s and men’s sprints Thursday and in a mixed relay Saturday at the Stelvio Ski Center in Bormio, which also hosted men’s Alpine skiing races.
Until recently, Gibson was best known as a trail runner who made it as far as the 2024 U.S. Olympic Track and Field Trials 1,500-meter semifinals.
As a teen, she earned 17 Wyoming state titles across track, cross-country running and Nordic skiing, won a junior national title in cross-country skiing and was valedictorian at Jackson Hole High School.
Veteran U.S. skimo athlete Cam Smith was piqued by Gibson’s athletic acumen last year. In June, Gibson and Smith both competed at the Broken Arrow Skyrace, a mountain climbing and trail running event in Olympic Valley, California.
Afterward, Smith pitched skimo to Gibson, who for years had considered the sport but never tried it.
“I was like, ‘Yeah, why not?’” she said on the “SkiMo Gold” podcast. “‘Give me the rundown. What’s the hard sell?’ I think [Smith] just caught me at a really good moment. I started my year off knowing it was the year of exploration, the year of experiments. I wanted to race my bike. I wanted to do longer running races. I wanted to do things that really challenged me.”
Gibson bought her first pair of skimo boots and went to her first skimo training camp in August. She competed in her first pro event in November. In December, Gibson and Smith qualified for the Olympics together in their last chance by winning a relay race in Utah.
O’Brien, a 23-year-old from Pewaukee, Wisconsin, had a similar journey as Gibson to the Milan Cortina Games.
O’Brien was seventh in the heptathlon at the 2024 Olympic Track and Field Trials. A strength and conditioning coach at Notre Dame, where O’Brien competed collegiately, said she had the power and speed to succeed as a bobsled push athlete. A year later, six-time Olympic medalist Elana Meyers Taylor direct messaged O’Brien on Instagram.
"We would love to have you tryout for bobsled!!!" she wrote.
Now, Meyers Taylor and O’Brien are medal contenders in the two-woman bobsled event in Cortina on Friday and Saturday. Meyers Taylor already won monobob, becoming at age 41 the oldest individual Winter Olympic gold medalist in history and tying Bonnie Blair as the most decorated American female Winter athlete.
Bobsled has a history of track and field converts, from Willie Davenport (1968 Olympic 110-meter hurdles gold medalist) to Lauryn Williams (2004 Olympic 100-meter silver medalist, who won bobsled silver with Meyers Taylor in 2014 in her first season). Even Renaldo Nehemiah and Willie Gault — star sprinters and Super Bowl winners – jumped into sleds, though not at the Olympics.
O’Brien, the 2024 and 2025 NCAA heptathlon runner-up, finished her track and field season Aug. 1, placing fifth at the USA Track and Field Outdoor Championships. She hopped into a bobsled for the first time later that month.
“To be a competitive multi-athlete [in the heptathlon or decathlon], you need to be able to learn things at a very fast pace,” O’Brien said of her track and field event, a two-day competition that includes the 100-meter hurdles, the high jump, the shot put, the 200 meters, the long jump, the javelin and the 800 meters.
“You need to be able to compete at a very high level while learning all those events, and then you also have to be able to adapt very quickly on the fly. So all those skills that I learned as a multi-athlete have helped me tremendously in the transition into bobsled because I had such a little amount of time to learn the sport and get competitive enough to make the Olympic team.”
In January, Meyers Taylor and O’Brien’s sled flipped over in a training run in Switzerland, with O’Brien getting ejected, sliding down the track and later having to go to a hospital. They came back to race later that week.
“I was in a lot of pain,” O’Brien said. “I couldn't really move in any direction, and so I was like, is it [bobsled] worth the risk? And at the end of the day, I said, ‘Yes, it is.’”
O’Brien plans to switch back to the heptathlon after the Milan Cortina Games and bid for the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics. In Olympic history, 11 Americans have competed in both the Summer and Winter Games.
“Despite how challenging the season has been, I've seen how incredible the sport is,” she said. “I've built so much respect for the athletes who do this, for the sport itself. So I do see myself coming back once I fulfill that Summer Olympic dream.”
