Boise native makes U.S. Olympic ski team. She started training a month ago
Boise native Sammy Smith didn’t start training on skis until a month ago. But that hasn’t slowed the two-sport star, who made her first Olympic roster Thursday.
The 20-year-old will represent the U.S. women’s cross country ski team at next month’s Winter Olympics in Italy, U.S. Ski & Snowboard announced. She is the youngest of eight women on the cross country team, which will compete in a variety of races Feb. 7 through Feb. 22.
“As soon as I learned what the Olympics were, I knew that was the stage that I ultimately dreamed of competing on,” Smith said in a phone interview from Switzerland on Friday. “To have it happen, it’s so exciting. I couldn’t be more proud to represent the U.S., and I’ll do my best to put my best foot forward.”
The 2024 Boise High graduate gambled with her Olympic chances this year, skipping the fall World Cup calendar while serving as a starting defender on the Stanford women’s soccer team that reached the NCAA national title game.
Missing those international races cost her the potential World Cup points that would have clinched her Olympic berth months ago. But it turned out she needed only one race to punch her ticket to Milan Cortina.
Smith finished 12th at last weekend’s sprint classic in Oberhof, Germany, the best result for any American in the race. That performance earned Smith enough points to vault into 42nd place in the World Cup standings in the final race before the Olympic cutoff.
Any American in the top 50 automatically qualifies for the Olympics.
Smith heads to the Milan Cortina Games with a burgeoning cross country ski resume. She won her second and third national titles earlier this month in Lake Placid, New York. She captured a silver medal at the FIS Ski Junior World Championships in 2024, the best-ever American finish in her event. And she’s finished inside the top 30 at a World Cup event 20 times.
But she’s also an international-level soccer talent. She represented the U.S. at the U-17 women’s World Cup in 2022 while attending Boise High. She helped lead her country to a bronze medal at the 2023 Pan American Games as part of a U-19 American team competing against senior national squads. And she competed with the U-19 team again in 2024 on a trip to Spain.
“I hope that I’ve shown that you don’t necessarily have to follow what other people are doing to have success,” Smith said. “I think it can be a pretty powerful message, especially for younger athletes who are getting pressured to specialize but are maybe really happy doing multiple different sports.
“Especially when you look at a sport like Nordic skiing, there are so many different aspects of training. While I completely recognize that the more traditional approaches tend to lend themselves to better results, there is also a lot of power in doing what you love and continuing to try to find different things that bring you joy.
“Because, ultimately, I think that contributes to a lot of the success you have as well.”
This story was originally published January 22, 2026 at 1:35 PM.
