To understand Sammy Smith, you have to understand what her past eight months have looked like. In June, she finished her freshman year at Stanford and, “for fun,” ran a Half Ironman — a 1.2-mile swim, 56-mile bike and 13.1-mile run — finishing second in her division. At the end of the month, Smith, 20, went to California to attend the U.S. Under-20 Women’s National Soccer Team training camp. Later that summer, she flew to Eagle Glacier, Alaska, to spend a few days training with a portion of the
In June, she finished her freshman year at Stanford and, “for fun,” ran a Half Ironman — a 1.2-mile swim, 56-mile bike and 13.1-mile run — finishing second in her division.
At the end of the month, Smith, 20, went to California to attend the U.S. Under-20 Women’s National Soccer Team training camp. Later that summer, she flew to Eagle Glacier, Alaska, to spend a few days training with a portion of the U.S. cross-country skiing team.
In July, Smith reported to campus for preseason soccer. Throughout the fall, she made 14 starts in 25 matches for the Cardinal, including two Final Four starts, as Stanford went all the way to the NCAA championship game, where they fell to Florida State 1-0 in early December.
Two days later, Smith flew to Alaska and trained just one day on skis before notching a second-place finish in a U.S. SuperTour race, a domestic competition series. She crammed in some cross-country skiing training in Sun Valley, Idaho, while home over Christmas, before winning the 1.5 km sprint at national championships in Lake Placid, N.Y., in early January.
At this point, the world’s best cross-country skiers had already spent over a month zig-zagging across Europe competing on the World Cup circuit, with an eye toward the Winter Olympics. The fight to make Team USA was well underway when Smith showed up, having missed the entire first portion of the season playing NCAA soccer.
It meant that while other athletes had multiple chances to notch strong World Cup performances and accumulate the points needed to gain a high enough ranking, Smith had only one shot. Most cross-country skiers qualified for Team USA by ranking high enough in the World Cup standings, and because of the number of quota spots the U.S. team had earned, Smith still had a chance despite the lack of World Cup races.
On Jan. 17, barely a month into the season, Smith needed a top-two finish in her heat in the sprint’s quarterfinals at the World Cup in Oberhof, Germany, to secure a top-12 result and a spot on the Olympic team. To do it, Smith needed a career-best performance.
“I honestly had no idea if it was going to be possible or not, and I wasn’t really sure what was going happen,” she said.
Smith spent most of the sprint in the back half of the pack, led by Jessie Diggins. As the snow was running out, she made her move. Working her way into the top three during the final climb, Smith snagged the inside of the final turn. With a last-minute surge, she caught and then passed Milla Grosberghaugen Andreassen of Norway to finish first in the heat, sending herself through to the semifinal and to the Milan Cortina Games.
Diggins, edged out of the semifinals in third, immediately greeted Smith with a hug and a “Let’s go!”
“That was a pretty emotional day, but incredibly exciting,” Smith said.
Smith is now set to make her Games debut in rarified air — not just as an Olympian, but as an athlete reaching for success at the highest level of two sports. In addition to playing for Stanford, Smith has competed internationally for the Under-19 U.S. Women’s National Soccer team, including as a member of the Pan American Games team that won bronze in Chile in 2023.
Competition runs in the family. Growing up, Smith’s parents signed her and her two siblings up for everything they wanted to try — soccer and cross-country skiing, but also freestyle skiing, track, lacrosse, hockey and tackle football (Sammy was a running back).
“Honestly, I took a liking to everything,” Smith said. “There’d be years where I was doing upwards of 10 or 11 sports a year.”
All events have concluded. See full medal count.
In high school, Sammy’s sister Logan won state titles in cross country and track and also found success in cross-country skiing before bone spurs forced her retirement. Logan recently finished her senior college soccer season, also at Stanford. Their brother, Tucker, plays soccer at Duke.
Eighteen months apart, the two sisters played on the same soccer team growing up, Logan playing up one year and Sammy playing up two.
“Our coach called her ‘missile,’ and she would just dribble around everyone,” Logan said.
Logan recalled an elementary school triathlon, in which the pair planned to complete together. Sammy, the stronger cyclist, waited for Logan to start the run. Logan, the stronger runner, paced with Sammy.
“Our plan was to cross the finish line together, but 10 yards before the finish line she started sprinting and beat me there,” Logan said, laughing. “I’m sure she could tell plenty of stories where I’ve done the same thing as well.”
Rick Kapala, Sammy’s longtime cross-country skiing coach at the Sun Valley Ski Education Foundation, first glimpsed her athletic prowess when Smith was about 11 years old.
Kapala was running a version of capture the flag on cross-country skis for a group of kids, an experience he calls “barely organized chaos.” On a field, split into two teams, skiers chase each other around, trying to catch opposing team members using flag football belts. Smith would often be the last one standing.
“You could not catch Sammy,” he said.
Then Kapala would get on his skis, too.
“I was like, there’s no way some 11-year-old girl is going to out-juke me,” he said. “It wasn’t even a contest. ‘We’d be like, holy s—, we cannot catch her.'”
Kapala considers Smith one of the most intrinsically motivated athletes he has ever coached. He would often see her out roller skiing on the bike path that runs through Sun Valley, training on her own outside of practice.
With as promising an athlete as Smith, many coaches would have encouraged her to commit solely to skiing. Not Kapala.
“We actually had a discussion within our staff about how hard we would want to, or even if we should, sort of, push her towards specializing, for example, in cross-country skiing,” Kapala said. “And we decided no, almost immediately. We were just like, ‘No, we’re not going to do it.’”
The way Kapala saw it, Smith was the driver behind her many interests, not her parents. And the skills she gained in a sport like soccer, such as strong fitness through running? All compliments to cross-country skiing, especially as a sprinter.
“What we did to accommodate her multiplicity was, we actually reduced the amount of time she had to be with us,” Kapala said. “Now, that’s anathema to the way a lot of coaches act. If you had a hyper-talented kid, for a lot of coaches, their natural reaction is to try to hold them even closer.”
Instead, Smith would often fly off for weeks at a time to attend soccer development camps.
“We’d be like, ‘See you later,’” Kapala said.
In an era of increasingly professionalizing youth sports, where young athletes are pushed to specialize in one thing at an early age, and families spend thousands of dollars on private clubs and clinics, Smith proves there’s another way to do things. Kapala calls her “the poster child for the importance of multiplicity in youth development.”
“What my parents have really tried to instill in me is that as long as I’m enjoying what I’m doing, I shouldn’t feel pressure to necessarily follow the beaten path,” Smith said. “I fully recognize that if you are concentrating on one sport from a younger age, and if I had been, I’d probably be at a higher level than I am right now in that sport. But I think by doing multiple sports, maybe I’m not at that ceiling yet, but I think my ceiling is ultimately higher.”
It’s something Logan thinks about while coaching private soccer lessons.
“It honestly makes me incredibly sad sometimes, seeing parents of these, as young as 7-year-olds or 8-year-olds, just getting their kids in private training and saying, ‘This is going to be their sport,’ and ‘How do we get them recruited for college?”’ Logan said. “I feel like there is just so much more to life and to sport out there, and I think part of finding what you love is having the opportunity to try other things.”
When it came time to choose a college, Smith considered a few schools where she could play soccer and also ski, but ultimately decided on Stanford for the strength of its soccer program and the chance to play with her sister.
During soccer season, Smith dedicates herself to the Cardinal. On her own time, she squeezes in extra conditioning. When Smith went off to school, Kapala loaded a truck with a massive classic ski treadmill, which he drove from Idaho to California and installed in a rented office space near campus where she could train. One semester, Sammy and Logan took a statistics course together, and measured Sammy’s blood lactate levels during workouts on the ski treadmill for a class project.
“She will always be the last one out on the trails, the last one on the field,” Logan said.
Two months removed from the NCAA soccer championship game, Smith is on the brink of making her first Olympic start. After her 12th-place finish in Germany, Smith posted a new career best with a fifth-place finish in the team sprint free with Julia Kern, just weeks before the Games.
And while she’s done it — she’s reached cross-country skiing’s biggest stage — Smith is just getting started. Many of her college teammates have gone on to sign professional contracts in the National Women’s Soccer League and play for the U.S. Women’s National Team. Kern is competing in her second Olympics, and Diggins, the veteran, will retire after her fourth.
Having devoted herself to two sports the way most elite athletes devote themselves to one, Smith is quickly approaching uncharted territory. As she said herself, who knows where her ceiling is?
But Smith knows one thing: She doesn’t have to choose.
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
Women's Soccer, Olympics, Global Sports
2026 The Athletic Media Company
Category: General Sports
