Alexandra Burghardt is a favorite in a winter sport she picked up in September.

Alexandra Burghardt adjusted her new Winter Olympics outfit in a hotel a few miles away from the bobsledding track in the mountains outside Beijing.

“Sometimes I feel like a double agent,” she said. “Two lives to handle.”

In August, Burghardt was running the 100 meters in the blazing heat of the Summer Olympics in Tokyo. Six months later, she has found herself in subzero temperatures in China, suiting up for the bobsled in the Winter Games.

On Saturday night in Yanqing, she found herself with a silver medal around her neck, standing on a podium with her teammate and bobsled pilot, Mariama Jamanka.

She joins a long line of sprinters turned bobsledders, runners whose explosive speed and strength on the track can translate to the ice. But this summer-to-winter Olympic whiplash was extreme. The Tokyo Olympics were postponed a year because of the coronavirus pandemic and held in July and August, six months before the start of the Beijing Games. Burghardt is one of the few athletes who will compete in both — two Olympics in less than a year.

For Burghardt, the turnaround was even more disorienting, given that she hadn’t even thought about competing in a Winter Games until September.

The German bobsled federation had long courted Burghart, 27, one of Germany’s fastest sprinters, hoping she could be the latest track star to push a bobsledding team to a gold medal. “We all knew her,” said Rene Spies, the head coach of the German bobsled team.

She politely declined for years. “Oh yeah, the German bobsled federation has wished for it for a long time,” Burghardt said. “I’m pretty tall and fast and that’s exactly what they need for a good brakewoman, but I wanted to get on with my actual sport first and try to reach my full potential before starting on a new adventure.”