2026 Olympic Hopeful Sammy Smith Is A Multi-Sport Phenomenon

Last January, after only one week of cross country skiing, Sammy Smith won the 2025 national championship classic sprint title.

“I genuinely had no idea what fitness I had coming in and how I was going to compete with other athletes,” said Smith. “It was a really fun week in Alaska.”

Why did the 20-year-old have such limited early-season on-snow training?

During the fall, Smith played for Stanford University’s women’s soccer team, helping the Cardinal make it to the Final Four at the NCAA Division 1 tournament. Her dream is to play with the U.S. Women’s National Team at FIFA World Cups and the Olympic Games.

But first, there’s the Olympic Winter Games Milano-Cortina 2026, and Smith is a strong contender to qualify for the sprint. The road to MiCo will not be easy though. The trick will be to successfully balance the trifecta of school, NCAA D1 soccer, and world-class skiing like she did last year. It’s nothing new for Smith, who juggled even more sports in high school.

Smith grew up in Boise, Idaho, in an athletic family. Her mom rowed at Stanford, and her dad played soccer at Duke. The Smiths raised their three kids—Logan, Sammy and Tucker—to be active, skiing in the winter and running and playing soccer in the warm months. When older sister Logan started cross country skiing, “I was like, I want to do exactly what she’s doing,” said Smith.

At first, Smith’s favorite winter sport was freestyle skiing. She finished sixth in moguls at the 2021 U.S. nationals. That fall, however, she suffered a tibial fracture after being hit in a soccer game. Unable to handle the impact of moguls that winter, she focused on Nordic skiing instead.

“The more I did it the more I fell in love with the sport,” Smith said.

In the warm months, she played soccer and ran cross-country. During four years at Boise High School, she helped the team win the state soccer title in 2022 and finish runner-up in 2020, 2021, and 2023. In cross-country running, she won the state 5A cross-country title as a freshman and was runner-up the next year (with that leg fracture). In the fall of 2022, she was named to the U.S. team competing at the FIFA U-17 World Cup in India, where she scored two goals in group play. After a 42-hour trip home from India, she jumped back into running, finishing seventh at states. It was enough to help her team win their fifth consecutive 5A state cross-country championship.

“I wasn’t happy with my result,” Smith admitted, “but considering I hadn’t run in over five weeks and had just gotten off a flight and was incredibly jetlagged, it could have gone a lot worse.”

Then came the 2022–2023 cross country ski season (Smith lived in Sun Valley in the winter and attended the Sun Valley Community School). Her goal was to ski well at the FIS Nordic Junior World Ski Championships in January and perhaps even earn her first World Cup start. Those close to her questioned how realistic the latter goal was.

“But I still was like, you gotta go for it,” she recalled.

Sick before 2023 junior worlds, Smith recovered in time to finish sixth in the 10km freestyle, eighth in the classic sprint, and ninth in the 20km classic mass start; those results, combined with solid finishes at U.S. nationals and Super Tour races did, indeed, earn her a World Cup berth. In nine starts, she scored World Cup points in every race that season.

During her senior year, Smith’s accolades continued to add up. She:

• Earned a bronze medal at the 2023 Pan American Games in Chile as a member of U.S. Soccer’s U-19 Women’s National Team.
• Competed in her first multi-stage Tour de Ski that January.
• Won a silver medal at FIS world juniors in the freestyle sprint—tied for the best-ever finish by an American in her event.
• Played for the U.S. U-19 National Team in Spain that spring.

Oh, and Smith earned admission to Stanford, where she would join sister Logan on the Cardinal soccer team.

Smith started her freshman year at Stanford last fall and appeared in 13 matches while logging 287 minutes. She did not even look at her skis until after the team exited the NCAA tournament on Dec. 8. She finished her first quarter exams, then switched her focus to skiing.

When winter quarter started on Jan. 6, Smith was in Anchorage, Alaska, where she earned her first senior national title in the sprint. From Alaska, she returned to Stanford, then continued to hopscotch around the world. In late January, at her final FIS Junior World Ski Championships, she took fifth in the classic sprint and eighth in the 10km freestyle race.

The rest of the winter, Smith competed in a dozen world cups, one of the three Americans to qualify for the sprint heats in every world cup sprint except one.

Between races in Europe, she flew back to Stanford, where she plans to pursue an environmental engineering major.

“I was on campus as much as possible,” she explained. “I did a lot of back and forth, which was a bit tough. Obviously, there’s not any snow on campus, so it was mostly dryland training. Then I would head over for races and just hope that I could perform on the day. I was really excited to get to race."

Before spring break last March, Smith took her calculus final at the University of Tallinn in Estonia.

“I scootered five miles there in the morning through the snow and took the test,” she said. “I was very appreciative that Stanford was able to work with me and help me set up an exam in a foreign country and get it proctored by their professors.”

After the exam, she competed in another world cup sprint.

Smith spent the summer pursuing her favorite sports—first a U.S. Women’s National Team soccer camp in Los Angeles, then a week skiing on Alaska’s Eagle Glacier. She flourished in both high-level training groups.

Then, she and her sister, Logan, competed in a 70.3 Ironman triathlon together in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, finishing second and third, respectively, in their age division.

“I just tried to pack it in during the summer and do all the things that I really enjoy doing,” she said.

Smith returned to Stanford in August. As of Oct. 9, she had started in eight of 11 games, with two assists and one shot on goal. She hopes to help the Cardinal make it to the Final Four again, then win the national championship. At 9-1-1, Stanford is currently the third-ranked D1 women’s soccer team in the country according to the United Soccer Coaches poll.

In an ideal world, Smith would then qualify for her first Olympic Winter Games in cross country skiing.

“You just spelled out my dream right there,” she said.

Her first cross country ski race will likely be the national championships again, slated for Lake Placid, New York, on Jan. 4-9, 2026. But she is taking it day by day.

“I’m just kind of living my life right now focusing on soccer season,” she said. “I’m super excited to have a chance to compete and hopefully win a national championship.”

She could say that about both sports.