Only 6 sportsmen have ever medalled at both Winter & Summer Olympics… Could Quinn Simmons be the 7th? “I want to set my sights on the 2034 Winter Games in Utah”

In a sport increasingly shaped by marginal gains and rigid career planning, Lidl-Trek's Quinn Simmons is openly entertaining an ambition that sits well outside the modern cycling playbook.

The American has made it clear that his Olympic horizon extends beyond the road. While Los Angeles 2028 represents a potential Summer Games target during the heart of his cycling career, Simmons is already looking further ahead to a far rarer goal.

“First I want to experience the Summer Games,” Simmons told Sporza, referring to Los Angeles. “After that, I want to set my sights on the 2034 Winter Games in Utah.”

It is a statement that immediately places Simmons in an almost empty historical space.

Olympic history underlines just how extraordinary that ambition is. Only six athletes have ever won medals at both the Summer and Winter Olympic Games.

That list consists of Eddie Eagan, still the only person to win gold at both editions; Norwegian multi-sport athlete Jacob Tullin Thams; East German speed skater turned track cyclist Christa Luding-Rothenburger, who achieved the feat in the same year; Canadian endurance specialist Clara Hughes; American sprinter-turned-bobsledder Lauryn Williams; and Steven Holcomb, who crossed from athletics into bobsleigh.

None of them made the leap from road cycling into an alpine endurance discipline. That is the gap Simmons is proposing to bridge.

What gives Simmons’ words weight is that ski mountaineering is not a novelty or a marketing hook in his story. Before he ever raced professionally on the road, it was his first elite sport.

Growing up in Colorado, Simmons competed at youth world level in ski mountaineering, a discipline that combines sustained uphill climbing on skis with technically demanding descents. The physical profile required is brutal and highly specific, but it helped shape the aerobic engine and resilience that later defined his rapid rise in cycling.

After switching sports, Simmons wasted little time. A junior world title accelerated him straight into the professional ranks, bypassing the long development curve most riders follow. Yet despite committing fully to cycling, he has never fully cut ties with the sport he came from.

Crucially, Simmons is not framing his Olympic ambition as a short-term crossover. The sequencing matters. Los Angeles 2028 fits squarely within his prime years as a professional cyclist. Utah 2034, by contrast, sits at the far end of a long elite career, offering space for a late pivot rather than a mid-career gamble.

Ski mountaineering’s recent inclusion on the Olympic programme only sharpens that focus. By naming a specific Games and a specific discipline, Simmons has removed much of the ambiguity that often surrounds Olympic crossover talk.

Whether he ever reaches that start line remains uncertain. Olympic history suggests the odds are stacked heavily against him. But by stating the goal so plainly, Simmons has already placed himself in a conversation that almost no active cyclist can credibly enter.

If he ever does succeed, he would not just become the seventh member of an exclusive Olympic club. He would be the first to take an entirely new path into it.