By MATTHEW STOSS
GW Magazine / Winter 2018

I

Three American bobsledders and I are sitting at a table in the Calgary Farmers Market in Canada. I, a 33-year-old man who’s afraid of roller coasters, have asked what it’s like to crash a bobsled.

“The sound is worse than anything else,” says Elana Meyers Taylor, BS ’06, MTA ’11, a GW softball great and a two-time Olympic medalist in the two-woman bobsled. She won bronze at Vancouver in 2010 and silver at Sochi in 2014 and will be a favorite to take gold in February at the 2018 winter games in Pyeongchang, South Korea. She’s also the first American woman to win a bobsled world championship.

“What does it sound like?” I say.

“Just think about driving your car against a cement wall,” says Kehri Jones, Taylor’s sometimes brakeman who ran track at Baylor.

“That’s a good descriptor,” Taylor says.

“Does the sound hurt your teeth?” I say.

“It doesn’t hurt your teeth — because you’re sideways,” Jones says. “You’re just trying to figure out what to do to stay inside [the bobsled] at that point.”

“It’s silent,” says Nic Taylor, Elana’s husband and a member of the men’s national team. He ran track at Boise State. All bobsledders come from other sports because youth bobsled doesn’t exist. The sport is prohibitively expensive, the sleds are prohibitively heavy, and going down a mile’s worth of icy death chute at 90 miles per hour in nothing but a motorcycle helmet and a set of full-body underpants is prohibitively dangerous.

“I thought it made the cement-scraping noise?” I say.

“Right before you crash, it goes silent because the runners are off the ice,” Elana says. “The runners on the ice usually make a lot of noise because it’s a concrete base and it’s ice. When you don’t hear anything, you don’t hear anything because that means the sled is airborne.”

I consider this and remember riding Space Mountain that one time. I was 31.

“Have you been airborne?” I say.

“Yes.”

Elana Meyers Taylor, 33, is a big, strong woman and the daughter of one of the greatest running backs in U.S. Naval Academy history. She took up bobsledding 10 years ago because she’d wanted to be an Olympian since she was 11 years old, and the 1996 summer games came to her hometown: Atlanta.

Blowing two tryouts for the U.S. national softball team—the first one because she stunk, swinging at pitches over her head and throwing one ball over the backstop; and the second because her ACL stunk—forced her to find an alternate sport, as did softball getting cut as an Olympic sport after the 2008 games. (It’s coming back in 2020.)

Her parents, Eddie and Janet Meyers, had suggested to Elana that she might be good at bobsled after watching another big, strong woman who converted to bobsled, former sprinter Vonetta Flowers, win a gold medal in 2002.

Family bobsled conversations continued through Taylor’s college softball career. She also had a college roommate with a bobsled connection: The roommate, a former GW women’s soccer player, worked with a trainer who recruited bobsledders. The roommate would later take a bobsled ride with Taylor at Lake Placid.

Taylor wrecked.

It happens.

“How often do you crash?” I say.

“I crashed four times last year, which is a lot,” Taylor says. “Most of the pilots don’t crash at all. But usually it’s only like once or twice a year you crash, out of over 200 runs.”

“Why do you crash so much?”

“She’s willing to take risks,” Jones says.

“I win,” Taylor says.

“You gotta crash to win,” Jones says.

The Calgary Farmers’ Market is an indoor warren of kiosks managed by vendors trying to out-organic each other in the politest possible way. The market is lit like a Santa’s village at a nice mall. Bored children touch stuff and obstruct foot traffic, couples do the same thing, and a young blonde girl plays the ukulele for tips.

Elana and Nic shop here once a week when they’re training at Canada Olympic Park in Calgary, an urban splotch stamped atop the foothills and grasslands that dominate Canada’s midsection.

The farmers’ market makes it easy to eat healthy and maintain all that gaudy Olympian musculature. Occasionally, the couple splurges for Indian food. They used to work part-time at the farmers’ market, stocking a produce stand because bobsled is both expensive and nonlucrative.

Elana is sponsored by 24-Hour Fitness, Bridgestone, Coca-Cola, Deloitte and Procter & Gamble, but those dollars don’t cover the full cost of a bobsledding habit. Or rent. Or food. Or travel.

She’s made side money working as a personal trainer and a substitute P.E. teacher. She’s worked for GE and at a burrito joint. Currently, she works for a U.S. Olympic Committee athlete-mentoring program.

“Sometimes you crash in order to figure out a line,” Elana says. “Sometimes you’re trying out new stuff, and then when you’re thinking about something that much and you’re trying to do it at 90 miles per hour, sometimes it just gets away from you.”

“Have you ever crashed on purpose to learn something?” I say.

“You never crash on purpose to learn something.”

“OK. I phrased it poorly. You risk a crash to learn something?”

“I will always risk a crash to learn something. If I need to figure something out, I’m figuring it out, regardless. You learn a lot from a crash.”

I learned a lot from Space Mountain. I’m still scared of roller coasters.

II

On the western edge of Calgary, abutting frontier on three sides and less than 50 miles east of the Canadian Rockies, the aerie of Canada Olympic Park sits on ground too small to be a mountain and too big to be a hill.

The complex is an upkept remnant of the 1988 Winter Olympics, a games remembered more by a certain generation as the setting for Cool Runnings than for any feat of sporting immortality. The track on which the Jamaican bobsled team did better in fiction than in real life remains and is one of four such tracks in North America, and it’s where Elana Meyers Taylor is training for three weeks in September.

Under ceilings almost high enough to harbor weather, there are gyms, concourses and hockey rinks circling a cafeteria that sells sandwiches at movie-theater prices. There’s also a vast room called the “Ice House,” where bobsledders, lugers and skeletoners practice on two small U-shaped tracks that look like fun.

Here, the 5-foot-8, 175-pound Taylor refines her speed, skill and buffness with other veteran and aspiring Olympians (mostly Canadians), while the non-Olympic sorts are left to perpend upon all the abs they don’t have.

It’s the sort of place where 10 years ago Taylor learned to bobsled under former U.S. women’s bobsled coach Bill Taveras. He helped transform Taylor from a shortstop — she hit .356 for her career at GW and better than .400 her junior and senior seasons — to one of the best women’s bobsled pilots on the planet.

The process started when Taylor cold-emailed Taveras in the summer of 2007. Taylor’s pro softball career had just died quietly following one penurious season in the underfunded and anonymous National Pro Fastpitch League. Around that time, Taylor’s parents, always aware of their daughter’s undying Olympic aspirations, continued to talk bobsled and again reminded her of Vonetta Flowers and the former track star’s second life as a bobsledder.

“We felt like, ‘This is something you can do right now and don’t have to learn over a period of time,’” says Taylor’s father, Eddie Meyers, who spent 10 years in the Marine Corps, which included a six-month tour in the Gulf War, and briefly played for the Atlanta Falcons in the 1980s. He’s now a regional president at PNC Bank. “‘... You’re quick, you’re strong — you have all those attributes today. There’s nothing really that you need to do different than what you’re already doing to be a good pusher in bobsled.’”

Taylor’s parents were not wrong.

“We’ve had great softball players come out for the team in the past,” says Taveras, referencing Shelly Stokes, who helped the U.S. softball team win a gold medal in Atlanta in 1996. “And from [Taylor’s] résumé, we knew she was a good athlete, so we invited her up to Lake Placid to go through our combine. … She just over-exceeded our expectations.”

Taylor finished the two-day combine that September looking not unlike a demigod, dominating, among other trials of power, speed and general kinesthesia, sprints of 15, 30, 45 and 60 meters, broad jumps, shotput throws, power cleans, squats and bench presses.

Ten years later, Taylor, who has a standing heart rate of around 40, runs the 30 meters in about 3.7 seconds, a time comparable to fellow bobsledder and former NCAA hurdling champion Lolo Jones. Taylor squats 400 pounds, deadlifts 400 and power cleans 250. She hasn’t bench-pressed since 2012, but when she did, she cleared 220 pounds. That’s only 5 pounds shy of what aspiring pro football players rep at the NFL Combine. She’s also made her running style conducive to bobsledding, shortening her stride so her feet have more contact with the ground. This is a good idea when sprinting for 50 meters down an icy hill with a 365-pound sled that’s all high on inertia.

“She is the best push-athlete and driver that we’ve ever had,” Taveras says.

Mythic athleticism aside, Taylor still had to get in a bobsled and slide the icy death chute without needing a change of shorts.

“We’ve sent athletes down the hill and watched them walk home because bobsled is not a calm sport,” Taveras says. “But once you see a smile on their face and you know they can handle it, you can send them through. After [Taylor] started running the sled, we knew she had what it takes.”

Taylor made the national team just a few months after auditioning in Lake Placid. Like all beginning bobsledders, she started as a brakeman. She made the move to driver in 2010, learning to manipulate the two ropes that steer the sled’s runners. Only a handful of bobsledders become pilots. Taveras taught Taylor to drive and served bravely as one of her first passengers.

“I ride down in the sled so I can see what they’re doing,” Taveras says. “The coach-and-athlete conversation is a little quicker that way. Instead of seeing them only in a couple of curves, I can see them in the whole track.”

Rookie pilots drive tracks in quarters or fifths, starting at the bottom and working their way to the top, turn by turn, to the push start and the speeds that launch stomachs throat-ward.

It takes a novice about eight years to master bobsled-driving, but Taylor, with discipline, focus and intelligence, went from greenhorn to Olympic medalist in four years, even studying the physics of how sleds run on ice.

Coaches, teammates and rivals also ascribe to her a third-eye track awareness that comes off as vaguely preternatural. And then there’s her devotion to the school of learn-by-crashing.

“When you push the limits,” Taveras says, “that’s what happens.”

III

At the Calgary Farmers’ Market, the three American bobsledders are showing me YouTube movies on their smartphones of bobsled wrecks. There’s one on there of Nic Taylor falling out the back of a sled as it takes a C-curve. It is a graceful, albeit nonconsensual, dismount.

Elana Meyers Taylor finds a still image of an airborne bobsled. The sled is upside down. Nic, her husband and a member of the U.S. national men’s bobsled team, tops that with a video of a bobsled going airborne, also upside down.

“And that’s where she gets into trouble,” Nic says.

The bobsled just hit a wall.

“More trouble,” he says.

The video progresses.

“Looks like she saved it,” I say.

Nic shakes his head.

The bobsled jerks up the track and pulls a quarter of a barrel roll before smashing the driver head first into the ice and wrenching off her helmet.

“I hope her head wasn’t in that,” I say. “What happened to the driver in the wreck? Is she alive?”

“Yeah,” Nic says.

“She didn’t snap her neck?”

“She was racing in the Olympics a few weeks later.”

Bobsled officially started in Switzerland in 1897. There are vintage movies on the internet of the daredevil pioneers who affixed a steering wheel to a wooden toboggan and sped snowy tracks, protected only by extra-strength chapstick and a nice holiday sweater.

Bobsledders established a governing body in 1923, the International Bobsleigh and Skeleton Federation, and the sport made its Olympic debut at Lake Placid in 1932. Twenty years later, bobsledding began to look like it does today: two or four people in a steel torpedo shooting toward frosty triumph or, as we learned from YouTube, a fate more painful.

“What do you think when it goes silent?” I say to Elana.

“You’re just pulling and trying to pull yourself out of it,” she says. “Like, you know you’ve made the mistake, but you’re trying to fix it and trying to salvage it as much as you can. And then it gets to the point where you can’t save it, but you’re trying to do it anyways.” “Do you warn the brakeman?” “Oh, usually I’m screaming,” Elana says. “I’m usually saying, ‘Oh, sugar honey ice tea or something.’”

Elana minds her language, even in times of peril.

“Or something like, ‘AHHHHHHHHHHH!’”

A bobsled costs about $250,000, and the U.S. women’s bobsled team has only three, so it’s ideal to not destroy them. The sleds used to come from former NASCAR driver Geoff Bodine, but in 2014, the national team switched to BMW-made models.

A bobsled interior, regardless of manufacturer, is spare of luxury. They have minimal padding and would seem comfortable only relative to the bedding at a county jail.

A person in a bobsled going full speed can pull multiple Gs, comparable to an astronaut during a space launch, and concussions are common. Groin and hamstring pulls are hazards due to the sideways-ish gait necessitated by the way sleds are pushed. Lower backs also wear down, and it is not uncommon for ex-bobsledders to have trouble walking in their golden years.

The risk of neck injury is high due to the weight of the helmet (about 4 pounds) and how often the head gets bounced around during a ride, which Taylor describes as being stuffed in a trash can and kicked down a rocky hill. But healthy post-bobsled lives largely depend on the frequency and the severity of crashes. People have died.

”When you wreck,” I say, “is it better to stay in the bobsled?”

“Yeah,” says Kehri Jones, a brakeman on the U.S. women’s bobsled team. “But it’s hard.”

“When you fly out,” I say, looking at Nic, “from watching you fall, I noticed there appears to be a technique to it.”

Nic laughs.

“You try and keep everything locked, arms and legs together, and try to slide like a penguin,” Elana says, “... If you sprawl out, then you could get injured. I’ve seen people break ankles because they get kicked out in a crash and they’ve been sprawled.”

“So you want to turn the track into a water slide?”

“But it hurts,” Jones says. “So you try to stay in as much as possible—but the pressure that was keeping you in the sled is now pulling you out of the sled.”

“How far will you slide?” I say.

“[The sled will] make it to the bottom,” Elana says. “Every single track in the world, you’ll make it.”

“How fast do you go without the sled?”

“Oh, the body? If you’re outside the sled, you’ll just make it a couple of curves, but that sled is going downhill hard.”

“And for a split second,” Nic says, “as soon as you flip over, as soon as you’re out, you’re going the same speed as the sled. But there’s more friction on your calves and arms than the blades, so you slow down faster.”

“Are your onesies padded anywhere?” I say. “You don’t have extra stuff in the butt?”

Everyone shakes their head.

“No?”

“You wear burn vests,” Jones says. “And the ice isn’t smooth. You find that out real quick — ’cause it seems like it’s smooth when you’re sliding down, but once your skin is on it, it’s sharp. Like knives.”

“It’s got little bumps on it,” Elana says.

Afternoon ebbs. Elana and Nic are going across town for physical therapy before dinner at an Indian restaurant where they know the owners and earnestly offer to wash dishes after meals.

Elana’s signed picture is on the wall by the host stand. She’s holding a Coke—it is important to plug one’s sponsor—and the picture next to hers features Kaillie Humphries, Canada’s premier women’s bobsledder, a 2014 Olympic gold medalist and Elana’s greatest rival.

“What is the allure of all this?” I say, asking one more question before the Taylors leave. “Why do you do it?”

“Because,” Elana says, “when you’re really hitting your drives right and when things are really going well, it is the most fun feeling I could ever think of. It is like flying and being a superhero.”

“What does that feel like?”

“You’re one with your sled. So it just feels like you’re moving, on and off curves, going as fast as you can, and it’s just like gliding. It literally feels like you’re flying through the air because it’s just so smooth and so nice, and that feeling is unlike anything I’ve ever felt.”

IV

A man once said that the difference between an enemy and a nemesis is that you go to your nemesis’s funeral. If you’re Kaillie Humphries, you also go to your nemesis’s wedding.

“I was a bit hesitant at first because, ‘Is her family going to hate me?’” says Humphries, who edged Elana Meyers Taylor by a tenth of a second at Sochi in 2014 for Olympic gold, sending Taylor to a dread and consolatory silver. The wedding was two months later. Humphries’s invite was a surprise.

“I don’t know how that’s going to be perceived,” Humphries continues. “But her parents are super cool and they’re really supportive of me still being who I am and competing, and I know my parents are very proud of Elana, regardless, win or lose. If I can’t win, I hope it’s Elana that gets to win, and I know she feels the same.”

Humphries and Taylor are the best women’s bobsled pilots in the world, made friends by mutual eliteness and mutual competitiveness. They dominate the eight-race World Cup circuit, the World Championships, and they are the first women since 1940 to compete in the four-man bobsled, an event once deemed too dangerous for women.

The two-woman bobsled event, currently the only women’s bobsled event, has been an Olympic sport only since 2002. Men compete in the two- and four-man. Lately, though, the International Olympic Committee has pushed its sports to do better on gender equity.

In 2014, the International Bobsleigh and Skeleton Federation, while also taking broadsides of grief from women’s bobsledders like Humphries and Taylor, legalized co-ed bobsledding.

“I [am] always searching for opportunities and analyzing possibilities to develop our sport in order to make it accessible for everyone—women and men equally,” IBSF President Ivo Ferriani writes in an email. “Watching the great performances of our female athletes and listening to their ambitions to compete in an additional discipline ... made it clear to me that we must work in this direction.”

Taylor plans to make a run at competing in the 2022 Olympics in Beijing driving a four-man sled. She’s also lobbying with Humphries for a four-woman event to be added in 2022.

(Ferriani says the IBSF is mulling a four-woman event but that it’s “too early” to say if it will happen in 2022, citing a concern about having enough teams that compete at a “top level.” New sleds also would have to be designed and built. Four-man sleds have a maximum weight—four guys, plus the 463-pound sled—of 1,389 pounds. Women aren’t big enough to hit that.)

Taylor and Humphries met about 10 years ago, and at Taylor’s suggestion, the two started training together in 2010, about the time Taylor took up driving. Humphries initially considered the request gauche and a brazen breach of competitive etiquette. She feared giving up her secrets but later realized that training with Taylor, whom she considers a superior athlete, would make her better.

“Not many people could push me within the sport,” Humphries says. “There was nobody in Canada at the time and there were very few people in the world at that time who could challenge me. It wasn’t an easy decision or a comfortable decision. It wasn’t nice or easy to do, but I knew Elana, and I respected Elana, and she worked really hard. It was going to push me to be better and not become complacent.”

Now, they root for each other (when appropriate).

“In Sochi,” Humphries says with a laugh, “… did I hope that she’d hit a couple of walls? Yep.”

Humphries isn’t braiding voodoo hair dolls of Taylor and lighting them on fire every equinox and solstice or anything. She wants Taylor, the Magic to her Bird—or the Bird to her Magic; it’s unclear who would be who in this hypothetical—to be safely at her best. Still, that doesn’t mean she’s grieving if Taylor rubs a wall and fattens her time by a hundredth of a second. And that, on occasion, does happen. Taylor’s piloting ensures it.

“Elana has a very free style of driving,” Humphries says. “She lets it run. She lives right on the edge. She just lets the sled fly.”

Taylor has speed records at five tracks. In the Ice House at Canada Olympic Park, where athletes practice on the bunny-slope equivalent of an ice track, Taylor’s name is all over the wall. And sometimes, so are her bobsleds.

“I’ll have one [crash] and she usually has three to four a year,” Humphries says. “I would say it’s not unusual. She does crash more than the majority of people. I would say she’s pretty average in the number of crashes a year that happen, but it is quite a bit for such an accomplished athlete—like, she crashes a lot for somebody who is a world-champion Olympic medalist.”

Coming off the 2017 world championship, Taylor raced on what will be the track for the 2018 Winter Olympics in South Korea. She crashed on the first run. She was the only one.

“At the end of the day,” Humphries says, “as long she’s OK, that’s the most important thing—regardless of anything.”

V

In the back of a hoppin’ little coffee shop where a bobsled trainer has a coffee named in his honor, in one of Calgary’s proliferating strip malls, Elana Meyers Taylor is describing to me the worst crash she ever had.

I’m drinking English breakfast tea and she has coffee.

The worst crash wasn’t the most violent or spectacular, though. The most violent and spectacular crash came during the fourth of six practice runs at the Sochi Olympics in 2014. Taylor’s brakeman pulled the brakes late, and the sled, going 80-some miles an hour, hit a cement wall prow-first at the end of the track. The impact shattered the chassis into shrapnel and rent the steel axle into postmodern art.

The backup sled, shipped to Russia for photo ops and press conferences, had to be cannibalized into a slideable vessel in one frantic night of mad scientist-ing.

Even in a reclamation sled held together by prayer and science, a probably whiplashed Taylor still managed to lead until the end when she nicked a wall in the third curve and lost to Kaillie Humphries by one contemptible tenth of a second.

The worst crash happened in Germany during the World Cup regular season in January 2015. Taylor came out of a looping curve going too fast and lost control.

“My head hit the ice, and the sled slid for a second and then slammed back up,” Taylor says. “I think it was the slamming back up, that jolt coming back up.”

The “it” is what caused the concussion.

“We still finished sixth,” Taylor says. “I came across the finish line, and I remember a whole bunch of people are yelling at me, asking me if I’m OK. But everything is in slow motion and the lights are so bright at this point. My head is pounding, and I get out of the sled and they’re starting the award ceremonies and they’re rushing me to the award ceremonies and finally I was like, ‘I gotta get outta here.’”

“It’s amazing you remember all this,” I say.

“I have more memory loss from previous events—and I don’t have the greatest memory now.”

Taylor gives a play-by-play of what happened next: A coterie of doctors examined her at the hotel, her teammates kept her up all night just in case, a concussion test administered a few days later. She claims she’s never failed one, despite having four concussions (that she knows of), and she passed this one. The concussion effects, though, persisted into the fall. She got irritable, irrational and emotional. She cried for no reason. She stopped sleeping and it hurt to read computer screens.

“My biggest thing was light-sensitivity and sensitivity to noise,” Taylor says, “and when that started going away and stuff like that, I started to feel better, started to compete and race again. We thought we were OK.”

Taylor kept racing and kept winning. Then in October, during another World Cup regular-season race, she blacked out in a curve.

“I didn’t crash or anything but I knew something wasn’t right,” Taylor says. “Finally, they were like, ‘This is enough. You can’t keep going like this,’ and they sent me home.”

Ten months after the concussion in Germany, she still had problems.

“What was wrong?” I say.

“My eyes didn’t track together,” Taylor says. “I didn’t really have good communication between my feet and head. I couldn’t feel exactly where I was in space … And I, traditionally, have a really good sense of balance, so to have those kinds of issues, it was really bad.”

“Do you worry about having memory problems when you get older?”

“A lot of the coaches and a lot of the people who have bobsledded for a really long time have memory issues, those kind of things, and seem a little slower. So it’s concerning, but at the same time … I feel like I’m recovered from that concussion and I haven’t had symptoms since, so we’re in a position right now that we can be competing. But if we feel like we get to a position that we can’t, or things get bad again, now that I understand the signs and symptoms—now I understand how it’s all linked together—then we’ll take action and stop sliding.”

Taylor wears a $2,000 special helmet designed off the dampening properties of a woodpecker skull. She mentions this as the barista brings coffee and tea refills. It’s Sunday morning, and Calgary for the first time in a week is seasonably cool but the views from the foothills are not all they should be.

British Columbia is burning.

From the west, the Rockies defended Canada’s third-largest city and kept away the last flames of a record-worst wildfire season. But while 12,000 rocky feet sufficed for a firewall, they couldn’t stop a wildfire haze from gauzing Calgary’s blue air brown. That’s wafting off now. It’s obvious, even from the shadowy back of the little coffee shop, where Taylor is talking about the 2014 Olympics, the crash in practice and that un-won gold medal.

“That’s what I’ve dreamt about my entire life,” she says. “To come that close and not be able to grab it. That’s devastating.”

“Did you cry?” I say.

“Yes—not at the time, not at the podium or anything like that. But yeah, I cried a lot over that medal.”

“Do you still cry?”

“No. I feel like if that didn’t happen, I wouldn’t be the pilot I am today and I wouldn’t be in the position I am in today. I learned a ton from that situation and I won world championships last year after that, but I wouldn’t have won those world championships without taking silver in that race. And who knows, maybe if I had won a gold medal, I would have retired and gone and done something else in my life. But everything happens for a reason.”

The coffee shop has emptied and the staff is cleaning after uncivilized patrons. It’s after lunchtime.

Taylor is leaning on her arms, her ever-present skullcap sitting high on her head, and talking about the value of every so often getting slapped down by the backhand of the universe.

“I genuinely feel you learn way more from failure than you do from success,” she says. “I feel like I’ve grown tremendously as a pilot as a result from that, just learning more about myself and how to compete and stuff like that. And bobsled is one of those sports where as soon as you feel like you have an angle on it—as soon as you feel like you’ve got the hang of it—it crumbles completely. The nature of the sport has taught me that you have to be humble, that you have to make sure you’re constantly learning from your mistakes and that you’re never content.”

And that is what it feels like to crash a bobsled.

⬤