CHICAGO — Three soccer players from Colorado were named to the 18-player roster for the 2024 Paris Olympic Games on Wednesday morning.
U.S. Women’s National Team (USWNT) head coach Emma Hayes announced that Lindsey Horan of Golden, Mallory Swanson of Highlands Ranch, and Sophia Smith of Windsor all made the team. Horan is headed to her third Olympics, Swanson to her second and Smith to her first, according to U.S. Soccer.
Midfielder Lindsey Horan, who was born in Wheat Ridge and lives in Golden, first made headlines when she became the first American woman to skip college and head straight to the pros after high school, according to Team USA. She played with Paris Saint Germain in France for four years before returning to the United States.
The 27-year-old graduated from Golden High School in 2012.
Swanson, 26, was born in Littleton and raised in Highlands Ranch. She attended Mountain Vista High School and graduated in 2016.
She scored seven goals in five games at the Concacaf U-20 Women’s Qualifying Tournament in December 2015. She was 17 years old at the time. The feat helped earn her a spot on the full Women's National Team.
Smith, 23, earned her first Senior National Team call-up in 2017 when she was just 16 years old. She made her debut in 2020 as the first player born in the 2000s to get on the field.
She was named the 2022 BioSteel U.S. Soccer Female Player of the Year.
She attended Fossil Ridge High School in Fort Collins.
On July 8, the 2024 U.S. Olympic Women’s Soccer Team will come together for the first time to prepare for the Impact 99 Legacy Match. They will take on Mexico on July 13 at Red Bull Arena in Harrison, New Jersey. On July 16, they will go up against Costa Rica for the 2024 Send-Off Match.
Those are the final two matches before the team heads to Paris.
The roster is made of two goalkeepers, six defenders, five midfielders and five forwards, according to U.S. Soccer.
The USWNT won the gold medal in the first year — 1996, in Atlanta — that welcomed women's soccer to the Olympics. They went on to win silver in 2000 in Sydney, and then three more gold medals in Greece in 2004, Beijing in 2008 and London in 2012. In 2021, they came away with a bronze medal.
One of the most notable absences from the roster was U.S. national team forward Alex Morgan, 34. The three-time Olympian missed more than a month with the San Diego Wave after injuring her left ankle on April 19, according to the Associated Press.
Coach Hayes told the AP that “there is no denying that it was an extremely competitive process.”
