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02/17 10:18 CST Elana Meyers Taylor nearly lost hope. Her team, her husband and
the Spurs helped her to Olympic gold
Elana Meyers Taylor nearly lost hope. Her team, her husband and the Spurs
helped her to Olympic gold
By TIM REYNOLDS
AP Sports Writer
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."
___
AP Olympics: https://apnews.com/hub/milan-cortina-2026-winter-olympics
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