Sophie Clarke Has Been Trying to Come Back on Survivor Since 2011

Which season of Survivor did Sophie win?

Sophie won Survivor: South Pacific in 2011. The season got off to an interesting start when host Jeff Probst revealed that each tribe would be joined by a returning player. Coach Wade and Ozzy Lusth ended up being those playersand Coach joined Sophie's tribe, Upolu. While she was initially skeptical about him, Coach and Sophie ended up in an alliance together with Rick Nelson, Albert Destrade, Edna Ma, and Brandon Hantz.

After the merge, the Upolu alliance systematically eliminated the minority alliance, and Sophie won two immunity challenges along the way. But even after the alliance eventually had to turn on each other, Sophie was able to convince Coach to side with her votes.

Sophie went on to win the final immunity challenge, and at the final tribal council, she pleaded her case alongside Coach and Albert. While the jury didn't like her often sardonic style of speaking, she was praised for her strategy, and she was able to point of Coach's many manipulations. She went on to win the season in a 6-3-0 vote.

What is Sophie Clarke doing now?

After Survivor, Sophie returned to med school, but she told Entertainment Weekly that she never practiced medicine because she didn't like it. "I quit, I left it. I kind of credit Survivor a bit with giving me the guts to make those kind of decisions," she explained. "Im not sure had I not done Survivor if I wouldve been the kind of person to have the courage to get off that moving treadmill of medicine."

Parade reports that she's now working as a healthcare manager, and she married entrepreneur Robert Shady in August 2019.

Why did Sophie Clarke come back for Survivor 40?

Sophie actually revealed to EW that she's been trying to come back to Survivor for a very long time: "I think Ive gotten called almost every single year since Ive been on the show and Ive been to the finals casting once, but I think that its probably for the best that I havent come back until now....As much as I really wanted to play over the last eight years, and as I much as I was crushed when I was an alternate, I feel like Im now getting to come back."

As for her strategy, Sophie said she hopes to endear herself to people by opening up, and she knows that she'll need to connect with every single player, instead of focusing on just one core alliance of a couple of people. "The one thing thats happened in the last eight years of Survivor is that its so fluid, its not enough to have a two- or three-person alliance thats really close," she told EW. "You have to have a relationship with every single person so that you can, at the flip of a dime, switch over to someone."