After Beijing medal mess, skicross racer Fanny Smith eyes a trouble-free podium at these Olympics

But after a lengthy video review, officials demoted Smith to fourth place and promoted Germany’s Daniela Maier to third. They judged that Smith had impeded Maier while splaying her skis as they jockeyed for position.

Smith vehemently protested the decision in the bitter Chinese cold to no avail.

She wasn’t done fighting, though. She appealed to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), which several months later took the rare decision of overruling the officials' decision and deemed that two bronze medals should be awarded. So more than a year after the race, Smith could celebrate her medal with her family at an event in Lausanne.

Now, Smith, at age 33, is eyeing what could be her last shot at Olympic gold at the Milan Cortina Games when the women's skicross event is held on Friday.

While she is as confident as ever in her abilities, she still feels let down by the skiing officials who tried to keep her from her bronze in China.

“For me what was really, really hard, and I’m still in the process of accepting, is that I have completely lost trust of the International Ski Federation,” Smith told The Associated Press in a recent interview. “I don’t have trust anymore in them because for me that was a mistake. And the CAS (decision) showed it.”

When asked for comment by the AP, International Ski and Snowboard Federation (FIS) spokesman Bruno Sassi said that its rules regarding in-race interference have not changed since the last Games. Those include the stipulation that “all jury decisions regarding interference cannot be protested.”

“Of course, the way everything unfolded in that very exceptional case in 2022 is not how we want to see results decided — in a court of law, after months of appeals,” Sassi said. “But it does not invalidate the principle of the sovereignty of the jury’s decision.”

Primed for gold

The mental ordeal of the medal dispute has not hurt Smith’s performances on the snow as she readies to compete at her fifth Olympic Games.

Smith, who served as Switzerland's flag bearer at the opening ceremony in Livigno, remains at the top of her sport, which involves four skiers racing together down on a course of banks, rollers and jumps. Some contact is allowed, and overtaking can be spectacular as well as dangerous.

She is the reigning skicross world champion after she claimed her second world title in March, the first coming back in 2013. She also won her fourth skicross Crystal Ball for finishing the World Cup season as the top-ranked competitor last year after having previously won it in 2013, 2019 and 2021. Those titles have come while she amassed 89 World Cup podiums in her 17 years of professional skiing.

So despite the medal mess from Beijing, she is not going to change her way of skiing when she hits the slopes of Livigno.

“I am honestly not thinking about changing my way of skiing because I don’t think that my way of skiing is wrong," she said. “I had never had problem before.”

Skicross is where the action is

Smith grew up at a Swiss ski resort, but found downhill “boring” once she tried skicross at age 12 and “straight away I knew that was the sport made for me.”

Smith was in Vancouver when skicross made its Olympic debut in 2010 and got her first bronze medal at the 2018 Pyeongchang Games.

She has also lived through the evolution toward easier courses that were supposed to reduce the risk of serious injury after a Canadian skier died at a World Cup skicross event in 2012, and two years later, as a Russian racer broke her spine while training on the skicross course of the 2014 Sochi Games.

But Smith says she is actually seeing more crashes caused by racers who are more carefree and take more risks when passing.

“Before, if you were doing a pass somewhere stupid, you would injure yourself and you will injure others, or maybe you will kill yourself,” Smith said. “Now it is kind of you could almost pass everywhere. So everyone tries to, and there is more contact.”

Skicross is forever in the shadow of downhill skiing and even has to compete for viewer attention with the spectacular aerial stunts of the freestyle skiers and snowboarders at the Olympics.

Smith, however, makes a convincing case that her sport is where the action is at if you want real racing with skiers going pole to pole to the finish line — as opposed to watching downhill skiers take turns competing against the clock.

“You don’t have to be a professional to know what’s happening. In Alpine, you would not understand why he is first and why this one is second,” Smith said. “But with us, it’s like Formula One, we are four racers against each other on the same course. There is always action.”

AP Olympics: https://apnews.com/hub/milan-cortina-2026-winter-olympics