Those who know Anna Gibson desperately want to try to explain Anna Gibson.
Unable to draw her as an actual action hero in a comic book, they resort to what feels like hyperbole. David Roche, her coach in an array of running pursuits, says: “In another life, she’d be a professional soccer player or a point guard or racing in the Tour de France or whatever else she wanted, because she’s not only an endurance freak, but she’s just a monstrous athlete.” Matt Chorney, her high school track coach, explains that this has always been clear. “When she was in ninth grade, I said, ‘This girl is going to the Olympics.’”
Which is exactly what’s happening now, because, as her teammate Cameron Smith says, “She wins everything she shows up to.”
For instance, the International Ski Mountaineering Federation World Cup in Solitude, Utah. It was back in mid-December. Gibson stood on the starting line. A newbie.
Ski mountaineering, or skimo, is a big deal in parts of Europe, but especially niche in the U.S. To the unacquainted, the sport sounds like some kind of punishment handed down by an Alpine god. Athletes race up — up! — a mountain using “skins,” essentially abrasive wraps attached to the bottom of skis, allowing one to move uphill on snow, defying nature and physics. Racers move through obstacles, reach a flat point on the course, remove the skins, transition to downhill skiers and race to the bottom.
Confused viewers will find out all about skimo as the sport makes its Olympics debut this winter. The docket includes men’s and women’s individual sprint races and a mixed relay.
All events have concluded. See full medal count.
Gibson grew up in Jackson, Wyo., spending an idyllic childhood at the foot of the Tetons, wearing skis as often as shoes. Her parents, Les and Maggie Gibson, owned a bagel shop in town, but focused most of their time and energy on outdoor sports and breathing the air. They dabbled a little in the traditional long-distance version of ski mountaineering. So, young Anna did, too.
But that was as a kid. Now, at 26, Gibson was set to compete in her first professional skimo race — a World Cup relay for a chance to go to the Olympics in a sport she began training for only six months earlier. The starting gun sounded, and off she went, jostling through a pack of 12 women, most far more experienced.
Gibson was teamed in the relay with Smith, a friend and 13-time American male national champion skimo racer. He was the one who convinced her to lean into the sport. He approached her at a trail running race earlier in 2025 and made his pitch. He felt Gibson’s natural speed and power might translate to world-class skimo racing and be enough for them to claim one of the 12 quota spots in the mixed relay at the 2026 Olympics.
With North America assured one spot in the Games, the duo’s lone goal at the Solitude race was to beat the Canadian team. It didn’t matter if Smith and Gibson finished 11th. As long as the Canadians were 12th, the U.S. would score a ticket to Italy.
That was the extent of expectations. After all, the U.S. team finished 10th, 11th or 12th in its six previous World Cup relays.
And what happened?
A bizarre confluence of fates. Gibson dominated. Smith dominated. The Americans not only beat the Canadians, but everyone else, too. Their winning time of 32 minutes and 17 seconds was nearly a full minute faster than the field. What began as a long shot ended with Gibson and Smith claiming the first U.S. gold medal in a skimo World Cup — ever.
“There’s no logical reason why we should have won the race,” Smith said.
Which is why everyone tries to explain Gibson.
“She’s the type of person,” Smith said, “that you want involved no matter what it ends up looking like.”
Why? An accumulation of talent and a disregard for limits. While Gibson nods along in conversation and admits, sure, she’s taken a bizarre course to the Olympics, she is not exactly surprised by any of this. Everything she’s done, everywhere she’s been — this is where it was going. This is what happens when you grow up in an era of hyper-specialized youth sports and refuse to follow the trends.
“I had a lot of moments in my childhood where there was pretty strong pressure from coaches or other people, even other athletes, thinking that I needed to choose what I wanted to do,” Gibson said. “I never bought into that policy. So I kept doing everything, switching from one sport to the next, from season to season. I just did the things I loved doing.”
At age 10, Gibson was a great Alpine skier, dreaming of the Olympics. “That was my thing.”
By 13, she started drifting toward Nordic skiing. “I thought that might be my thing.”
By 16, she was one of the best middle- and long-distance runners in Wyoming and recruited by top college track and field programs. She fell in love, she says, “with the exacting nature of running.” That did not stop her, though, from going out and winning some Nordic skiing junior national championships on the side.
This is about when the typical elite teenage athlete — those few of the few — would subscribe to travel camps and intense training schedules. Gibson spent her summers kayaking, camping, hiking, climbing, windsurfing, walking, running, searching, finding. Whatever she woke up wanting to do.
Gibson began college at Brown University, combining track and field with an Ivy League degree. Derailed by injuries, she never competed for the school and transferred to the University of Washington. There, she qualified for two NCAA indoor and two NCAA outdoor track championships and anchored the school’s NCAA record-breaking distance medley relay in 2023. This was, in theory, a time for Gibson to narrow her focus.
Instead, she disappeared on weekends to go backcountry skiing in Vancouver or hiking around the mountainsides outside Seattle. Why? Not because she wanted to, but because she had to.
“My college teammate saw me in this phase where I was escaping the NCAA intensity by driving up into the mountains to get away,” she said. “I don’t think they ever had a full concept of what I was doing or why I was doing it.”
This is Gibson’s wiring. It’s never changed.
She’s remained among the top American 1,500-meter runners since college. She landed an endorsement deal with Brooks and qualified for the 2024 U.S. Olympic Trials in Eugene, Ore. It amounted to the biggest race of her life on the biggest stage in American track.
The week before the Trials, though, Gibson decided to compete in the Broken Arrow VK at Palisades Tahoe ski resort, a 3.6-mile dash up 3,000 feet of ascent to the summit of 9,000-foot Washeshu Peak.
“The polar opposite of what anyone else on the starting line at Hayward Field would’ve been doing a few days before the trials,” Roche, her coach, said. “But Anna is Anna, so you just go with it.”
Of late, Gibson has gravitated more and more toward trail running, a sport gaining popularity and sponsorship opportunities. Last summer, at the U.S. national championships — two laps up and down Mount Sunapee in New Hampshire — she hoped for a solid showing and instead won. In September, making her debut in the World Mountain and Trail Running Championships in Spain, she won bronze in the Uphill 6K and finished 13th (out of 110) in the 14K Mountain Classic.
But biking is interesting, too, no? So Gibson has gotten into that. She entered the Crusher in the Tushar in July, an elite 69-mile gravel race through Utah with 10,000 feet of incline. She finished third.
“Unheard of,” said Chorney, her former high school track coach, now a friend and training partner. “That was as wild to me as making these Olympics. Like, skiing is at least similar to running, as far as going uphill. But on a bike? There are people who devote their entire lives to doing what she did.”
Add it all up. If, in a lab of some sort, one humming with supercomputers and unstable molecules, you were concocting the ideal ski mountaineer, mixing the right combination of power, endurance and one obscure superpower — an innate ability to always move uphill, against all rationale — this is what you’d get.
You’d get Anna Gibson.
When Smith approached her with the idea, it all made sense. Gibson is, at heart, a skier. Roach didn’t hesitate to put her running training schedule on hold this winter because, as he puts it, “You can’t keep Queen Elsa off the ice.”
There was only the matter of, you know, learning the sport. Transitions, for instance. One of the keys to skimo is a racer’s ability to remove the skins from the skis and morph into a downhiller. (Think of a pit stop in NASCAR.) What might take you or me 10 minutes, they do in about 15 seconds. Gibson has spent every free moment practicing the process, over and over, wherever she is. Chorney arrived at her house not long ago to find her sitting on a yoga mat in her front yard, going through the routine.
Is she improving?
“I think so?” she answered, shrugging.
Not exactly what you expect to hear from an Olympian, but Gibson doesn’t seem fazed.
“I’m a beginner,” she continued. “Like, I am new to skimo itself. I don’t know all the names. I don’t know all the characters. I don’t have all these skills perfected. But at the same time, in some sense, I have been training for this my entire life.”
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
Olympics, Global Sports, Women's Olympics, women's sports
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