Let’s put a hold on the obsession with Olympic gold — with models, sports scions and record-breakers. And let’s worship instead the athlete who is the embodiment of silver’s brilliance and accessible resilience: Elana Meyers Taylor.
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She’s the Olympian you’d most want to have a beer with. Except, she’s a nursing mom. So maybe it’s a cup of tea.
Yes, the four-time, four-medal Olympian is an elite bobsledder. And unless you’re counting the Nitro at Six Flags (or my Wednesday-morning carpool last year), few of us can relate to the harrowing, icy thrill ride the 37-year-old commands.
But the daily grind of balancing family life and a demanding job? That sounds familiar. Constant obstacles of office politics and logistical nightmares? We can relate. Meyers Taylor has faced all that. And slayed.
U.S. Olympic moms overcome hurdles — and have the medals and abs to prove it
Meyers Taylor is a new parent with a spouse in the same business. Every day, she deals with what she calls “the Meyers-Taylor traveling circus” of strollers and multicolored-plastic kid equipment, a larger production than the usual kid show because of the special needs that Down syndrome adds to their child’s routines. They all travel together to competitions to keep his therapies going and because she’s still nursing.
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She’s a woman who has faced discrimination in her field and spoken out about it. She was selected to carry the U.S. flag in the Opening Ceremonies, but gave the spot to someone else when she tested positive for the coronavirus. She was quarantined for the days she was supposed to be training and nursing her baby. As soon as she tested negative, she dragged herself out of bed to compete anyhow. And she killed it.
That’s the hero I want.
“I feel like my head’s finally starting to clear,” she told The Post’s Barry Svrluga, the day before she won silver in a historic bobsled race. “It’s been pretty foggy and bogged down with stress.”
Nevertheless, she persisted.
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Meyers Taylor, who will return to compete in the two-woman bobsled Friday and Saturday, began setting records the moment she set foot in D.C. She was the first softball player George Washington University recruited when it established the team and she joined up from her Georgia high school in the early 2000s. She was a star shortstop, even though — according to a painful and heartfelt essay she wrote for the Team USA website — a coach many years ago had told her: “Black people don’t play shortstop, you belong in the outfield.”
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“You see, shortstop is seen as a skilled position and from his perspective black athletes lacked the brain power for this position,” Meyers Taylor wrote. “This perception of black athletes would follow me throughout my career. However, from that day forward my mother started coaching me, and I would eventually earn a college scholarship as a shortstop.
Every year on the George Washington team, she was MVP, and a steady co-captain as the team endured a coach who allegedly abused the team mentally and emotionally. That coach was dismissed and investigated.
“There are a lot more positives, which is a big help to our confidence,” Elana Meyers, then a junior and co-captain, told the campus paper, the Hatchet, in 2004, after a new coach was hired. “We have the freedom to make mistakes.”
When she left softball, she joined the world of bobsledding, where she had some breathtaking victories and met her husband, fellow bobsledder Nic Taylor. She won bronze in Vancouver in 2010, and silver in Sochi in 2014 and PyeongChang in 2018. When the sport opened up the possibility for co-ed sleds, she qualified for national competition as the female driver of three men. (Again, sounds like my carpool.)
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But even with all those victories, she didn’t find anything was easier.
“I had always believed that once I reached the elite level of sport people wouldn’t care about the color of your skin,” she wrote in that June 2020 essay. “When I entered the sport of bobsled, I realized how wrong that idea was.”
Women make history and their husbands get the credit. How infuriating is that?
She is a driver, the most skilled position on the sled. And, like the coach who told her she shouldn’t play shortstop, the maker of one of the fastest bobsleds in the world didn’t want someone who looked like her to drive his sled.
“This one manufacturer refuses to sell to black pilots,” she wrote, “ … and has been quoted saying ‘if I wanted to see a monkey drive a sled, I’d go to the zoo.' ”
She said she’ll never drive one of his sleds, even if it were a sure path to the gold.
That’s why silver is so beautiful on her. It shines like integrity.