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No mountains? No problem.
Uruguay, the South American country known for its sunny beaches and star soccer players, just hosted its first-ever alpine ski national championships with a pair of giant slalom races.
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There’s an obvious catch, though.
As with the surfing events held during the 2024 Paris Summer Olympics (Paris isn’t known for its big waves, of course—Tahiti proved to be a good workaround), the ski race’s organizers had to contend with geography. After all, the highest point in Uruguay is only about 1,685 feet.
So, on September 14, they headed to Chile—a country with taller peaks—and gathered at El Colorado ski resort with backing from FIS, the international governing body for alpine racing and other ski sports.
“This is so much more than simply holding a sporting event,” Asociación de Ski y Snowboard del Uruguay (ASSU) president, Joaquín Gallinal Carrau, told FIS. “It represents a statement about what is possible when geography is not allowed to define our ambitions.”
The day’s races saw athletes from all around the world, with racers representing Switzerland, the USA, and Italy, to name only a few.
Among their ranks was Uruguay’s Nicolás Pirozzi, who placed tenth, the highest of any athlete from his country in the men’s and women’s fields.
Earlier this year, Pirozzi also broke a 28-year streak and became the first Uruguayan skier since Gabriel Hottegindre to compete in the Winter Olympics.
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For Carrau, the recent race in Chile “is the beginning of something bigger: building a snow sports culture and creating a pathway for Uruguayan athletes to compete internationally,” he said.
He added that his association wants to expand into other disciplines beyond alpine ski racing, noting that “we now have the first woman to represent Uruguay in Alpine Skiing and the first Uruguayan athlete to compete in Ski Cross.” In the women’s giant slalom at El Colorado, Mariana Vanrell represented Uruguay.
The feel-good story reflects those of other unlikely-seeming countries with ambitions to field athletes in Olympic winter sports. Jamaica, for instance, became an international sensation when it sent a bobsled team to the 1988 Games in Calgary, Alberta, an event that inspired the movie Cool Runnings.
Carrau told FIS that “geography is not allowed to define our ambitions.”
“Uruguay has no mountains and no natural snow, but we do have passion, determination, and people willing to create opportunities where they did not previously exist,” he said.
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This story was originally published September 16, 2026 at 9:37 AM.