Su Yiming sat in the snow at the bottom of the snowboarding course, tears rolling down his cheeks.

BEIJING | Xinhua | As the Milan-Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics opened Friday night, 15-year-old Chen Keyu, a rising star on China’s national ice hockey team, sat glued to her screen in Shenzhen, tracking every shift of the hockey competitions in Italy.

Ski mountaineering, or 'skimo', is a brand-new event to the Winter Olympics debuting at the 2026 Games in Milan-Cortina.

With snow falling, Fatton navigated the uphill-then-downhill course lined with a diamond-shaped pattern and stairs in a lung-searing time of 2 minutes, 59.77 seconds.