Bellingham Balancing Two Olympic Disciplines

If you’re seeking adventure, check out Phil Bellingham’s Instagram for an impressive bucket list.

He paddles down rapids in a kayak, paraglides over French mountains, and hikes the Arctic Circle in Greenland. He tackles the environmental extremes in Iceland, from posing in front of molten lava to swimming with icebergs wearing only his briefs.

So, it’s perhaps little surprise, when the 32-year-old from Mt Beauty, Victoria, says he’s contemplating a new Olympic adventure for 2026.

Having represented Australia at three Olympics Games in Cross Country Skiing, Bellingham is considering a switch to the new Olympic sport of Ski Mountaineering – or SkiMo - in time for its debut in Milano Cortina 2026.

Bellingham this year contested the Cross Country Skiing World Championships, before heading to Spain for the Ski Mountaineering World Championships where he placed 46th in the sprint, 49th in the vertical and 51st in the individual.

“There was a bit of an opportunity there and [I was] looking forward to trying something new I guess,” said Bellingham, who has been on snow since he was 18-months-old and Cross Country Skiing from the age of six.

“My motivation is dwindling a little bit for Cross Country Skiing, so to open a new chapter and to do something completely different was pretty motivating. I’d been watching that space for a while, just seeing how that sport would unfold with the decision around it being in the Olympics in 2026. So I had been doing some Ski Mountaineering kind-of-stuff a bit, but never really racing. I thought it would suit me, so I gave it a crack.”

For those unfamiliar, SkiMo is like off-piste alpine skiing, except there’s no easy chairlift ride to the top of the mountain. Athletes charge their way up by foot.

Bellingham’s endurance from Cross Country Skiing serves him well in the sport, but he’s also enjoying the challenge of adapting to SkiMo’s unique skills.

“There’s a lot of similarities in terms of the length of the sport and the type of athlete that’s needed to be successful, so there’s a lot of cross-over,” he says.

“But at the same point, there’s some pretty major differences in the sport and it took me a while to get my head around what I needed to do and how to go about the sport in terms of performance, tactics, techniques and that sort of thing.

“It’s a little bit like an extreme version of cross country running, in terms of you’re scaling some pretty big mountains and then you’ve got some pretty challenging descents as well.

“It’s all on skis and there’s some interesting transition techniques, where you’re going from skiing to running and uphill to downhill. I guess it’s interesting in that there’s a lot of variation in what’s happening in the race.

“It was a pretty challenging learning experience, that’s for sure. I went into it not having a whole lot of knowledge about the sport and then I came out of it in a pretty good position.”

Bellingham has contested more than 100 elite Cross Country Skiing events and made his Olympic debut in 2014. So there’s a lot to consider when it comes to choosing the path forward.

While he enjoys pushing his body and mind to the limits, Bellingham says the time will come when he needs to focus on one discipline over the other in preparation for a run at his fourth Olympics in Milano Cortina.

“I think if I’m going to go one way or the other I need to put more eggs in one basket because this season I was spread a little bit thin and I don’t think I was at my best, skiing at my capacity, for either sport,” Bellingham says

 “I was spreading myself a little bit thin, so I’d need to make a decision going forward and commit more to one or the other.”