Story By Aimee Berg
Photos: Atkin/Gu/Kim (Getty Images), Smith (U.S. Ski & Snowboard)
STANFORD, Calif. - This year will mark an extremely rare inflection point in Stanford sports history. For the first time, at least four undergraduates from The Farm will be competing in the Olympic Winter Games.
All four chose Stanford for academic excellence despite its lack of snow and ice. All four have intense majors – from simultaneously conquering a computer science and pre-med track to environmental systems engineering.
Three stepped out for part of the Olympic year, and one – in less than seven weeks – went from vying for an NCAA Division I soccer title to racing on cross-country skis in Alaska, then New York (where she won two national titles), and eventually Germany to beat some of the world’s top skiers to make the US 2026 Olympic team.
Here is a look at The Farm’s Fab Four, their backstories, how they balance academics and athletics, and what to expect in Milano-Cortina.
Zoe Atkin (Great Britain) Freeskiing Halfpipe
Senior Zoe Atkin, 23, is the reigning world champion and Winter X Games gold medalist in freeski halfpipe, which means she launches out of 22-foot-high walls six times to flip and spin for the judges in a best-of-two- or -three run format. What distinguishes Atkin is her massive amplitude out of the pipe, and the fact that she is one of only a few women in the world who can spin all four directions (forward left, forward right, and backward – or “switch” – left and right).
The symbolic systems major from Newton, Massachusetts, grew up skiing on weekends in Maine with her British father, Malaysian mother, and older sister, Izzy. At 9, the family moved to Park City, Utah, because Izzy was a rising talent in slopestyle.
In 2019, a year after, Izzy earned Great Britain’s first Olympic medal in freeskiing (bronze), Zoe won her first World Cup halfpipe event at 16 – which was semi-normal for a student at the Winter Sports School whose alumni include Olympic gold medalists in alpine skiing, freeskiing – even bobsled.
Still, Atkin said, “I never really expected to become a pro skier. But I always wanted to go to college.”
At 19, she made her Olympic debut in Beijing, placed ninth, and arrived at Stanford “in a bit of a funk. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to actually continue competing,” she said. Stanford provided the perfect break. “I was like, ‘I just want to go to school and be a normal student,’” she said.
After living in the all-freshman Crothers Hall during fall quarter of 2022, she said, “I felt a bit better. To develop an identity outside of skiing was huge for me.” She decided to keep skiing, took 2023 winter quarter off, promptly won the Winter X Games, and made the podium in all her events that season – calling that season “a huge confidence boost.”
Since then, Atkin has been taking her fall finals early, moving out of on-campus housing, and competing during winter quarter. But she’s never far from her books.
“Contrary to popular belief,” she said, “skiing is a year-round sport. We’re always chasing winter, and halfpipe is very specific. To do the tricks and go as big as we do, it’s really dangerous if we don’t have a quality halfpipe, so we go to specific camps around the world.” That means flying to Europe or Oceania during school, training all day, watching lectures at night, and Zooming into office hours.
The pinnacle of her career, so far, came in 2025, in Switzerland, when Atkin won world championship gold in halfpipe one day before spring classes started. She dashed to the airport, then straight to her sorority, Pi Phi.
On The Farm, no one had any idea she was the world champion. In fact, Atkin can’t recall ever crossing paths in the Quad with her chief competitor, Eileen Gu, who seized three medals at the 2022 Olympics.
This year, Atkin took a leave of absence in both the fall and winter to prepare for her second Olympics, where she and Gu are favored to finish 1-2 in the ‘pipe.
All this time, one class has stuck with Atkin: the intro seminar: “How Beliefs Create Reality.”
It taught her the power of her mind. She’d relay everything to her coach and they integrated the lessons directly from the classroom to the hill.
As a result of that class and her symbolic systems major, Atkin says, “I’ve cultivated a very strong mind-muscle connection, and I learned the importance of it through school.”
After the Games, Atkin plans to return to campus this spring. “The best quarter,” she said.
Eileen Gu (China) Freeskiing Halfpipe, Slopestyle
The 22-year-old freeskiing phenom Eileen Gu came to Stanford after the 2022 Beijing Olympics, where she won halfpipe gold, big air gold, and slopestyle silver for the host nation, China. Though born and raised in the Bay Area, she represented her mother’s homeland and became the first athlete ever to win three medals in freeskiing.
Gu had long been an extraordinary student – scoring 1580 on her SATs and becoming the first in her school’s history to graduate a year early. When she got into Stanford via early decision, she said it was her dream since she was 6, “the only dream I’ve had for longer than my dream of going to the Olympics.”
Once enrolled, she took quantum physics, joined a sorority, and settled on an international relations major. In between, she posed for the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue; made the covers of Time, Vogue Hong Kong; and walked runways in Milan, Shanghai, Paris, and New York. Every year since 2022, she’s been among the four highest-paid female athletes according to Forbes, making a combined $87.4 million during that span.
Finally, after watching Gu juggle school, skiing, and fashion, her mother and confidante, Yan, (a 1994 Stanford MBA) convinced Eileen to take off the current school year to prepare for Milano Cortina, where she is favored to defend both of her Olympic gold medals.
After a hard crash in August in New Zealand, Gu has rarely competed this winter, but she did win two World Cup events in her specialties – including a 1-2 finish with Atkin in the halfpipe at Secret Garden, China, in December. Only 1.5 points split the Stanfordites, to set up an epic (world champ vs. Olympic champ) showdown on Feb. 21.
Brandon Kim (USA) short track speed skating
In Italy, Brandon Kim, 24, a junior from Fairfax, Virginia, will be ripping around a 111-meter oval at 30 mph on short track speed skates with 17.5-inch blades. Turns are so tight that collisions are inevitable.
Kim was a rapt 8-year-old when he first saw short track on TV at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics. A year later, he gave it a clumsy try. “The coach gave me a bucket or a foldy chair to push around so I would stop falling,” he recalled. But Kim was a quick study.
At the 2017 Junior World Championships, Kim set an American record in the relay while attending his ultra-rigorous STEM high school. Later that year, he was the youngest man in the US Olympic Trials, at 16.
As high school ended, he applied to Stanford early, got in, narrowly missed the cut for the 2022 Olympic team, and moved into Rinconada that fall.
Absent a rink and finding Wilbur dorm rooms to be “pretty tight,” he’d lift at the regular student gym. For cardio, he’d run on the Cobb Track and Angell Field late at night until someone would kick him off. “Not traditional short track training, that’s for sure.
Freshman year, he said, “I really thought I’d go to the first set of World Cups, have fun, not skate that well, and that would probably be it.” Instead, he placed sixth in a 500m race and helped the US capture a mixed relay bronze. “After that, I was like, ‘I think I can keep this up.’ I can maintain that.
But how? Kim’s commitment to his computer science major and pre-med track made it “tricky to follow a specific program,” he said. “I have a lot of schoolwork, and training is kind of secondary to that. I don’t always know if I’ll be able to go to the gym. Some days, I can’t.
So he aimed for consistency. On average, he’d work out four to seven hours per week compared to the 30-40 hours his national teammates would put in
“It’s not ideal,” he said, yet his talent was undeniable. At the 2023 World Championships in South Korea, after about eight weeks off-ice, “he shows up and beat one of the best skaters in the world,” recalled US coach Stephen Gough, referring to triple Olympic medalist Steven Dubois of Canada. “Passed him on the inside.
In 2025, for the first time, Kim took the school year off to train full-time with the US team in Salt Lake City. Surprisingly, having a single focus didn’t mean more free time
“It’s actually a lot more time-consuming than you might think – and I’m tired all the time because I practice 10 times more than I would if I’m at school,” Kim said
Mono-tasking paid off, however. In September, Kim broke a nearly 13-year-old American record in 500m and swept US National titles in 500, 1000m, and 1500m to earn a berth on the World Cup tour. On his third try, he finally made the three-man US Olympic team. He will have four shots at a medal in Italy, and will try to become the first US man in 20 years to make the podium in his best event: 500m.
Medal(s) or not, Kim plans to keep skating for another Olympic cycle – even if he’s in medical school (where he’d like to pursue orthopedics or neurosurgery).
“If you had asked anyone four years ago if what I did would be possible, not a single person would say ‘Yes.’ Even me. I just had to wing it and figure it out as I went along.”
Sammy Smith (USA) cross-country skiing
And finally, one of the busiest Cardinal women of all, sophomore Sammy Smith, learned she made the US Olympic cross-country ski team less than seven weeks after starting in the NCAA women’s soccer championship match against Florida State.
After the Cardinal’s 1-0 loss to the Seminoles in Kansas City, Missouri, on Dec. 8, Smith flew to Anchorage, placed second and fourth in two races, then schlepped to Lake Placid, New York, and won two national 1.5km sprint titles – enough for the US team to put her on a plane to Germany, where she made the semifinals of another sprint and beat the most acclaimed female US cross-country skier of all time, Jessie Diggins, in their quarterfinal.
All that while taking 17 or 18 units toward her environmental systems engineering degree.
As wild as it is to compete at the highest level in two sports, Smith, 20, played six or seven while growing up in Idaho – from gymnastics to tackle football, track, cross-country running, soccer, moguls skiing, ice hockey, and Nordic skiing.
Eventually, people told her to specialize and “of course once I got to college, people were like, ‘That’s never going to work,’” she said. “Obviously, there’s doubt, a lot of challenges, and a lot I’ve had to work through. But I love to play soccer at Stanford, and I really love to ski!”
Stanford always had a strong pull for Smith. Her mother, Kristen (Sweeney) was a 1990 graduate who rowed crew. Her older sister, Logan, was on the soccer team. And the quarter system sounded ideal. “I was like, ‘Perfect, I can take winter quarter off!” she said, “but I hadn’t thought about the eligibility requirements.” A leave of absence would also mean leaving the soccer team – which she isn’t about to do. Also, she finds it healthier not to think about competition 24/7.
But the radical change from college soccer to world-class cross-country skiing is gobsmacking – to everybody, except, perhaps, Smith.
“For the most part, the strength we do as a [soccer] team is very-very translatable to skiing,” she said, citing gains in explosiveness, balance, power, coordination. Core and upper body work, she does on her own.
Other than running hill intervals on the Stanford Dish (with ski poles and bleeding from pin-prick lactate tests which she said recently prompted 15 women to “come up and ask if they could help, call someone, or give me a tissue. Then I had a child point at me and go, ‘Mama, what’s wrong with her?’), she uses a roller-ski treadmill at an office in Palo Alto.
And one last thing. “Efficiency is a huge part of my life,” she said. Instead of leaving gaps between classes to decompress, Smith recommends the opposite. “I block all my classes really tightly together to give myself bigger windows for a concrete training block or a concrete study block. Because if you have 40 minutes between class, you can’t really do that much homework, or you’ll just look at your phone. I also set a lot of time limits. I try to be really committed to getting my stuff done and not get distracted. It’s hard and you’re gonna make sacrifices. For me, what matters most is my love of sport and my love of school. So it hasn’t been hard for me to prioritize the two.”