CORTINA D'AMPEZZO, Italy (AP) — It was a couple of weeks before Christmas. Elana Meyers Taylor was in Norway, prepping for a World Cup bobsled weekend. Things were going horribly. Her body was hurting, she wondered if she was doing right by her two deaf children, and the racing results were, well, bad.
So, she texted her husband. The message: I’m done.
“This is just impossible,” the U.S. bobsledding great wrote. “It’s never going to work.”
Funny how an Olympic gold medal changes things. Barely two months after nearly quitting — her husband, former bobsledder Nic Taylor, flew to Norway after those texts to talk her out of it — Meyers Taylor won the women’s monobob gold medal at the Milan Cortina Games. And she was back on the ice Tuesday, prepping with Jadin O’Brien for the two-woman race that starts Friday.
“The only thing that has really changed is I’m sleep-deprived now,” Meyers Taylor said. “I’m an Olympic gold medalist with a lack of sleep.”
That’s a good problem to have.
At 41, she became the oldest woman to win an individual gold medal in Winter Games history. (Anette Norberg, then 43, was on the Swedish team that won curling gold at the 2010 Vancouver Games.) Meyers Taylor’s sixth career Olympic medal tied Bonnie Blair for the most by a U.S. woman in the Winter Games, and it also extended her record for most medals by a Black woman in the winter showcase.
“Oh, I don’t think I’m going to process this for a while,” Meyers Taylor said. ”There were so many moments during this entire season, during this past four years, that we just thought it was impossible, or I thought it wasn’t possible. My team around me believed in me the entire time.”
Turns out, so did her husband’s team. Nic Taylor is now a performance coach and works with the NBA’s San Antonio Spurs. When a Spurs player — the couple won’t say who — learned Meyers Taylor was struggling, Nic Taylor was gifted a plane ticket and told go to Norway immediately.
Without that gift, who knows what would have happened.
“As soon as I saw that E had won, I just started screaming, jumping, hugging anyone who was close. Almost passed out because I was excited,” said O’Brien, a bobsled rookie who was recruited to the team last fall by Meyers Taylor — and now is an Olympian. “Without a doubt, the coolest sports moment I’ve ever been part of.”
To put that praise in perspective — “the coolest sports moment” she’s ever been part of — consider that O’Brien won three NCAA indoor track championships in pentathlon at Notre Dame and was a 10-time All-American there.
“Yeah, that’s saying something,” O’Brien said. “It was beyond incredible.”
Meyers Taylor, just in case, spent part of Monday before the final two monobob runs teaching her two sons sign language for various terms — like gold medal, and Olympic champion. She insists that she didn’t think they would actually need to use them.
They’re going to get used a lot going forward. The boys — Nico, 5, and Noah, 3 — evidently knew what was happening. The coolest thing that happened in Day 1 as a gold medalist, Meyers Taylor said, was Noah putting on the gold medal.
“He knew. He started signing, ‘Noah, champion,’” Meyers Taylor said. “I didn’t get it on video because he wasn’t wearing pants, of course, because what toddler wants to wear pants?”
It’s somewhat understandable that Meyers Taylor didn’t think her kids would need to know terms like “gold medal.” Her results this season didn’t exactly make it seem likely.
She was 10th in the World Cup monobob standings; eight women won medals on the circuit this winter and she wasn’t one of them. Her average finish was 10th and her result at Cortina during a race on the Olympic track in November was 19th — a whopping 2.43 seconds behind the winning time.
And her Olympic history was simultaneously filled with heartbreak and accomplishment. At the 2014 Sochi Games, she led Kaillie Humphries Armbruster — then from Canada, now her U.S. teammate and the bronze medalist on Monday night — going into the final run of the two-woman race. She lost the final run by 0.21 seconds, enough to lose the gold medal by 0.10 seconds. Then at the 2018 Pyeongchang Olympics, she lost the two-woman race by 0.07 seconds.
Monday’s race was even closer — the margin between Meyers Taylor and silver medalist Laura Nolte of Germany was just 0.04 seconds.
But this time, she got it done.
“That’s a moment I’ve been working for every four years and that’s why I came back is for that moment, to be on that start line and feel that again,” Meyers Taylor said. ”That is a crazy addictive feeling and I don’t know where I’m going to get it from after I leave this sport.”
There’s the retirement talk again.
She and her husband want a third child. Meyers Taylor has said countless times that she feels lucky to have her kids on tour, but it’s a daunting task, even with a nanny there to assist. Traveling with three might be too much.
Besides, there’s nothing else to prove. She’s won everything the sport offers.
“I was determined to keep fighting, determined to just put down the best runs I could,” Meyers Taylor said. ”And look what happened.”
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