Sophia Kirkby Saw a Gap at the Olympics and Filled It With Clay. Meet the Pin Trading Queen.

Sophia Kirkby grew up in Lake Placid, New York, an American hot bed for winter sports. She’s the daughter of a bobsledder, was a figure skater since age 4, and she knew what the Olympics were before pre-K. Sixteen years later, she was there…competing. 

Her Road to Cortina

Kirkby got into luge at 8. From there, it was a steady climb to the top. She began on youth sleds, in junior programs, and committed to leveling up, year after year.

"It was almost like going to school, but a little different," she reflects.

She describes her development like an F1 driver coming up through go-karting. Learn the machine. Level up. Repeat. For sixteen years.

When she finally made the 2026 Olympic team, it wasn't a life-changing moment. It was the eventual arrival of a dream that had been a long time coming.

"It just officially happened. It was just such a cool, beautiful feeling."

Camp Cortina

Her Olympic village experience wasn't exactly what you'd picture. Kirkby's setup was in a temporary trailer park on an old airstrip, a long, skinny stretch of ground with a lot of walking between point A and point B.

"It was like if you went to camp and instead of being a child you're in your twenties or thirties. You get all these activities, a cafeteria, security. A lot of cool, fun things happen randomly, like the President of Italy came for lunch one day. But it was like being at camp, and if camp were also long and skinny."

She didn’t complain. She had made it to Camp Cortina.

The Pin Trading Queen 

Here's what most athletes don't do at the Olympics: spot a market gap and take full advantage of the opportunity. Kirkby isn’t like most athletes. 

Pin trading is a hallowed Olympic tradition. Kirkby, an avid ceramics hobbyist, realized nobody was selling handmade pins designed by an actual competing athlete. Taking this gap in stride, a year before the Games, she was already at a test event in Cortina, walking the grounds, making contact with a local shop, laying the groundwork for her future pin trading business.

"I was in Cortina earlier. I didn't just show up at the Olympics hoping to do this. I was at the original test event a year prior. I walked around, made contact with that store, and we discussed it further."

By the time the Olympics arrived, she had 300 pins on her own, and a distribution network she'd built herself. She had a local shop in Cortina stocked with pins. She placed bags of 50 with insiders stationed across six Italian villages. She shared pins with Olympic legends Jessie Diggins and Hilary Knight. 

The reception was mixed at first, in the way that most new things are.

"People would look at my pin, and if they didn't know about it, they'd be like, 'Oh, that's not really good.' And then I'd say, 'Oh, I made them. I'm an Olympian. I just raced.'"

Context changed everything. Once people knew the maker was the athlete, the dynamic flipped.

"I had other people who would stop me and beg for pins."

She gave away far more than she sold, and that was fine by her. Her pin trading business was never purely about revenue.

"Honestly, I wanted to have lots of fun with it."

The Athlete-Entrepreneur Mentality

Kirkby is not the first elite athlete to discover that the same wiring that builds a champion also builds a business. 3x Paralympian snowboarder and BioDapt founder Mike Schultz, built a company used by 95% of the world's top Paralympic lower-limb snowboard athletes with a mentality built through sport.

The mechanism is the same in both domains: set a goal, create before conditions are perfect (practice), make tweaks in response to feedback (get coached), and launch (compete).

Kirkby did just that. She scouted the opportunity a full year out. She built inventory. She created a distribution network across a country she was visiting for ten days. She got rejected, yet she kept going.

"I had a product that was handmade by the Olympian herself."

Most people wait for perfect conditions. Elite athletes (and elite entrepreneurs) don’t.

The easiest part of Kirkby's story to overlook is the timing. She didn't qualify for the Olympics and then wonder what to do with the moment. She went to the Olympic test event, identified an opportunity, and came back twelve months later ready to execute (in pin trading and luge!).

That's the thing about preparation: it doesn't wait for the moment to feel right. It creates the moment. You already know what you've been putting off. Kirkby's answer was 300 handmade pins and a distribution network across six Italian villages. What's yours?

ABOUT THIS SERIES

I'm Amy Wotovich, and I'm on a mission to personally interview 100% of the 2026 U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Team. How do elite athletes train their mindset, overcome failure, sustain dominance, and compete with confidence? Follow the journey to find out as Sophia Kirkby is one of 304 athletes sharing their unfiltered answers.