It might seem odd to talk about going full circle when you’re only 23, but Samara (Sammie) Maxwell has done exactly that – at least when it comes to ice cream. And that speaks volumes about her current mental state. Whereas she once avoided ice cream at all costs, now she says it’s a superpower.
From age 5, spurred by the reward of the treat, she would furiously chase her father and big brother through the forest mountain bike trails near the family home in Taupō. By her teens, she wouldn’t touch ice cream – or much else.
She got skinny. Too skinny. Anorexia nervosa was diagnosed. Doctors recommended hospital treatment. A long learning curve followed – about the disease, the psychology of the illness, about herself. It’s a journey, she declares, that is ongoing.
“The biggest thing for me,” she tells the Listener from her temporary base in Girona, Spain, “has always been: I can handle not winning as long as I can walk away saying I tried my best. And now, I’m shifting to: I can walk away as long as I can say I put my health first, I put myself first.”
Maxwell comes across as grounded, exuberant, funny, matter of fact and gloriously unfiltered. In April, she became the first New Zealand woman to win a mountain bike world series race at elite level in her cross-country Olympic event. A television interviewer suggested Maxwell now had a target on her back. Her response? “Mate, it’s only one race.”
She followed that up with second in the next world series meet and in her post-race interview shared how she almost didn’t start because of crippling period pain in the days before. She also spoke about impostor syndrome, the anxiety that her breakthrough performance was a flash in the pan, and the sage advice her team gave her: “So what if it was? Better a once-was than a never-was. Just go and enjoy racing.”
As much as frankness is part of her personality, it is also a conscious decision. “I have always wanted to act as a good role model for younger athletes,” she posted back in 2021, “and to do that I have finally realised I should start to open up about my own struggles and help others avoid such problems.” Plenty of struggles have followed, but there have been highs, too: becoming under-23 world champion in Scotland in 2023, and now wearing the No 1 race bib of the world’s leading rider in her event. But true to form, she doesn’t want people to look at her on the podium and think all is hunky dory.
Balancing the need to be in outstanding race shape with general wellbeing is difficult, more so with her health background. But this season it is a case of so far, so great. Since winning the season-opening world series race in Brazil, she has shown remarkable consistency, finishing second in the next four races. Then in Andorra this month, she won, despite two falls and a puncture. After six events in the 10-race season, Maxwell leads her nearest rival 1535 points to 1090.
The physical and mental
Our cyclists punch well above their weight. Most notably, our track riders have won world and Olympic titles. But Kiwis are impressive in other disciplines, such as road and mountain biking.
Maxwell’s event is long-course mountain bike cross country. It is the only mountain biking discipline that is an Olympic event, hence the shorthand XCO, “cross country Olympic”. Maxwell also does a sprint event that takes about 20 minutes, but the big one is XCO, a gruelling test of up to two hours that involves climbing and rough terrain. Think brutal uphills, treacherous descents, tree roots, mud, rock gardens.
It’s a physical and a mental test that requires deep concentration, great bike-handling and smart tactics. Some climbs are so steep that even professionals hop off and run. As for the descents, a sensible lay person might think twice about even walking down.
Maxwell has a fine skillset but nonetheless reaches to touch wood as she tells me she has not – don’t say never – broken a bone. “No, I haven’t broken a bone, but there have been a few stitched knees. That’s my weak point.” A few years ago, she crashed on a training ride days before flying to race in Europe. She got on the plane, on crutches, 13 stitches in her knee. “I cut the stitches out myself in my hotel in France. So, that is the worst injury I’ve had.”
Not to downplay the physical risks, but the biggest threat to Maxwell’s desire for a long career is mental. Typically for someone who loves to study (she has a biomedical sciences degree and plans to make a career in the field when her professional racing days are over), she has read up on the psychology of eating disorders. But she also recognises that knowledge can mean little to someone in the grip of such illnesses. It was, for instance, after she became world junior champion that she first spoke about ice cream as a superpower. Yet, within months she was again in a bad place with her eating and her weight, so much so that early last year, with the blessing of her professional team, Decathlon Ford Racing, she took a break to get well.
Food as the enemy
Everyone who has an eating disorder gets asked why it started, she says. “And I genuinely don’t think most people have an answer. For me, I was finding my identity as an athlete and started eating stricter. And that led to unintentional weight loss. Once your brain gets malnourished some switches flick, I guess … and I get a fight or flight response when I see food.”
She was diagnosed at 15. “It happened really quickly, I’d say a month. You go from a normal weight to anorexic. I was really unhealthy. Everyone around me could see that I was really sick.”
Maxwell baulked at hospital treatment. “I love my studies, and I said, ‘No, it’s NCEA at the moment. You can’t put me in the hospital.’ But I stopped biking and had regular weigh-ins and medical checkups. My parents were incredible. Honestly, without them, I probably would have died. One time they sat me down with a glass of chocolate milk and … said, ‘Sammie, we love you, but we are going to be the bad cops right now. You’ve got to drink that.’”
Gradually, she got to a weight she describes as lean but not anorexic. In hindsight, she can clearly see her problems were not over. “I still had those thoughts,” she says. Thoughts that food, or sufficient food, was her enemy.
In some endurance sports, such as cycling, there can be an obsession with what is called the power-to-weight ratio – a calculation of the wattage an athlete produces per kilogramme of weight. Other variables aside, the idea is that of two riders with identical power capabilities, the lighter of the two will go faster. “I also think part of that is, as a cyclist I identify as a climber, as being lightweight. I make my attacks on the hills.”
It is super hard to differentiate between thoughts that drive you to be an athlete and those that drive a fear of weight gain.
For several years, the psychological side of Maxwell’s eating disorder took a back seat. When she was 16, it was decided her symptoms fitted a syndrome called RED-S, or relative energy deficiency in sport. Coined by the International Olympic Committee in 2014, the condition had primarily been known as the “female athlete triad”, which focused on three key aspects: disordered eating, irregular menstruation and low bone density.
Psychological factors come into the first aspect but, for whatever reason, for a half a dozen years the mental side of Maxwell’s troubles were overlooked. The expert help instead focused on diet; a plan to ensure she got enough energy from food to sustain her high-performance training and maintain a healthy immune system.
“I would find myself going to see a nutritionist. I’d walk away with a plan to eat two more eggs for supper and have full-fat milk with my breakfast and have a hot chocolate and an extra shake after training. And I genuinely would sit there and go, ‘Yep, yep, yep’, and I’d be on board. And then as soon as the food was in front of me, I just couldn’t do it because I’d never had that mental therapy.”
Despite everything, Maxwell excelled – beating the favourites in 2023 to become junior world champion – until it caught up with her early last year. That’s when High Performance Sport NZ organised a range of assessments, including psychological, from which it was concluded that Maxwell had never fully recovered from anorexia.
As summer of 2024 gave way to autumn, interval sessions and gym work were replaced with walks in the Taupō sunshine, baking, Wordle, leisurely bike rides and, as she put it, some “work-ons with my brain”.
“I started therapy without really knowing how long it was going to take. No one really knew. Then it got to the point where they said, you pick the Olympics, or you pick continuing therapy. And I chose the Olympics. I’m glad I did because I think it’s something I had to do.”
Fighting to ride
Maxwell linked back with her team in Europe, which put in place medical support and touchstones, such as a minimum weight she had to maintain. She produced her best performances as an elite rider.
Even so, there was a problem: Cycling New Zealand hadn’t selected her for Paris 2024. Those charged with the decision thought the pressure of an Olympics was too great, given her history.
Maxwell was left with only the option of an appeal to Sports Tribunal New Zealand. She isn’t bitter about having to go through that process; she realises Cycling New Zealand thought it was doing the best thing by her. Moreover, the decision not to pick her was, in context, understandable. The sport came in for heavy criticism in a 2022 report (and subsequently a 2025 coroner’s inquest) for failing to guard the wellbeing of track cyclist Olivia Podmore, who died by suspected suicide in 2021.
Maxwell’s appeal was successful but the story blew up in the media and only got bigger when, with just a few weeks’ notice that she would be on the plane, Maxwell exceeded everyone’s expectations, placing eighth.
Since the Olympics, Maxwell’s trajectory has been relentlessly upward. Her results, her story and her hard-case, girl-next-door persona make her a sought-after interviewee and a social media hit.
She’s trying, she says, to keep her feet on the ground. Amid the euphoria of her first elite-level win, she wrote on Instagram, “I don’t want my recent results to create the illusion that this hard work is over. I still need to change if I want to be sustainable.”
While it is extremely difficult to be in top form throughout the long season, Maxwell has an incentive for world series races seven and eight in France in August and Switzerland in September – it will be the first time her parents have seen her race in Europe.
Looking further ahead, she would dearly love to be in Los Angeles in 2028 to try to improve on her Olympic debut. But before then, she plans to take time out to commit to her recovery. That, she says, will likely be next year, and involve putting aside her identity as a cyclist to focus on increasing her body weight to new levels.
“It is super hard to differentiate between some of these thoughts that drive you to be a professional athlete and thoughts that drive a fear of weight gain. To solve that, I need to walk away from cycling for a bit.”
For inspiration Maxwell need look no further than Swedish rival Jenny Rissveds, the 2016 Olympic champion who left the sport to address depression and an eating disorder and returned, literally bigger and stronger, to win multiple World Cup races and the bronze medal eight years later in Paris.