Anna Gibson and Jadin O’Brien to compete at Winter Olympics after vying for places in Paris

MILAN – Anna Gibson and Jadin O’Brien are fighting for a spot on the 2024 Summer Olympic team, but their Olympic debut 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 Olympics in skiing.

In skimo, athletes run up and down a course and alternate between skiing and walking (with their skis attached to their backs). Medals will be awarded in the women’s and men’s sprints on Thursday and in the mixed events on Saturday at the Stelvio Ski Center in Bormio, which also hosted the men’s Alpine skiing races.

Until recently, Gibson was widely known as the top runner who reached the 2024 US Olympic Track and Field Trials 1,500-meter semifinals.

As a teenager, he earned 17 Wyoming state titles in all track, cross country and Nordic skiing, won a junior national title in cross country skiing and was valedictorian at Jackson Hole High School.

Veteran American skimo athlete Cam Smith was struck by Gibson’s athletic prowess last year. In June, Gibson and Smith both competed in the Broken Arrow Skyrace, a hiking and trail running event in Olympic Valley, California.

Afterward, Smith gave Gibson a skimo ride, who had been thinking about the sport for years but had never tried it.

“I was like, ‘Yeah, why?'” he said on the SkiMo Gold podcast. “‘Give me a report. What’s so difficult?’ I think (Smith) just caught me at a really good time. I started my year knowing that it was a testing year, a testing year. I wanted to race my bike. I wanted to do long runs. I wanted to do things that really challenged me.”

Gibson bought his first skimo boots and attended his first skimo training camp in August. He entered his first professional 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 the same trip as Gibson to the Milan Cortina Games.

O’Brien was seventh in the heptathlon at the 2024 Olympic Track and Field Trials. The strength and conditioning coach at Notre Dame, where O’Brien competes collegiately, said he has the strength and speed to excel as a push athlete. A year later, six-time Olympic medalist Elana Meyers Taylor sent O’Brien a direct message on Instagram.

“We would love for you to try bobsled!!!” he wrote.

Now, Meyers Taylor and O’Brien are medal contenders in the women’s doubles event held in Cortina on Friday and Saturday. Meyers Taylor has already won the monobob, at age 41 becoming the oldest Winter Olympic gold medalist in history and tying Bonnie Blair as the most decorated American winter athlete.

Bobsled has a history of track and field revolutionaries, from Willie Davenport (1968 Olympic 110-meter hurdles gold medalist) to Lauryn Williams (2004 Olympic 100-meter silver medalist, who won silver tied with Meyers Taylor in 2014 in his first season). Even Renaldo Nehemiah and Willie Gault – superstar athletes and Super Bowl winners – have jumped on sleds, though not at the Olympics.

O’Brien, the 2024 and 2025 NCAA heptathlon runner-up, finished his track and field season on Aug. 1 past, coming in fifth place at the USA Track and Field Outdoor Championships. He jumped on a bobsled for the first time later that month.

“To be a competitive multi-sport athlete (in a heptathlon or decathlon), you need to be able to learn things very quickly,” O’Brien said of his track and field event, a two-day event that includes the 100-meter hurdles, high jump, shot put, 200 meters, long jump, javelin and 800 meters.

“You have to be able to compete at a very high level while learning all these events, and then you have to be able to adapt very quickly. So all those skills I learned as a multi-athlete helped me a lot in the transition to bobsled because I had a little time to learn the sport and compete enough to make the Olympic team.”

In January, Meyers Taylor and O’Brien’s sled skidded during training in Switzerland, with O’Brien ejected, sliding down the track and later having to go to the hospital. They came back to run later that week.

“I was in a lot of pain,” O’Brien said. I couldn’t really move in any direction, so I said, is it (bobsled) worth the risk? And at the end of the day, I said, ‘Yes, of course.’

O’Brien plans to switch 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.

“Although the season was difficult, I saw an excellent game,” he said. “I have a lot of respect for the athletes who do this, in sports itself.