CORTINA D'AMPEZZO, Italy (AP) — Kaillie Humphries Armbruster saw the leaderboard at the midpoint of the two-woman bobsled competition at the Milan Cortina Games, not loving the fact that she's in third place after the first two runs of the event.
That said, she knows nothing is decided.
“Anything can happen,” Humphries Armbruster said.
A pair of German sleds and one from the U.S. — the one driven by Humphries Armbruster — have separated themselves a bit
from the pack after Friday night's first two heats of the event, with the final, medal-deciding runs coming Saturday night.
Laura Nolte and Deborah Levi have the lead with a two-run time of 1 minute, 53.93 seconds. Lisa Buckwitz and Neele Schuten are second for Germany in 1:54.11, while Humphries Armbruster and Jasmine Jones — the first two-mom sled in U.S. Olympic bobsled history — are third in 1:54.16.
“It's a very, very good feeling for the first night,” Nolte said.
Nolte, the World Cup points champion and reigning world two-woman champion, also led at the midpoint of the women's monobob race as well — then faltered a tiny bit in the fourth and final heat and finished 0.04 seconds behind American veteran Elana Meyers Taylor, who got her first Olympic gold medal.
It's a lesson Nolte remembers well. And the flip side of it rang true on Friday.
Meyers Taylor is 12th after two runs of this race, out of medal contention after she and Olympic rookie Jadin O'Brien went into a big skid at the very top of the track in their second heat. They kept bleeding time the whole way down, finishing 1.2 seconds — a massive margin in sliding — off the lead.
“Sometimes, that's just how it goes,” O'Brien, a three-time NCAA track champion at Notre Dame with eyes on the Los Angeles Games in 2028, said after her Olympic debut. “You're sliding on ice.”
Indeed, ice is slippery.
And even someone like Meyers Taylor, one of the best drivers the sport has seen, can make a little mistake that turns into a big problem.
“That's racing. That's sport. And I’ve been blessed to have a lot of really, really good races in my career and a lot, a lot of really good Olympic races and today wasn’t our day," said Meyers Taylor, who had a special fan waiting for her at the finish — former International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach, who gave his former IOC intern a conciliatory hug after that second run. “That was a devastating mistake, but we get to come back out here and put two good runs together tomorrow and fight till the finish.”
Kaysha Love and Azaria Hill of the U.S. are right in the mix as well, sitting fifth — four-tenths of a second out of the bronze-medal spot.
“At the end of the day, I like to think about the controllables, and I can’t control what they can do, but I can control what we can do," Love said. "And that gives me more comfort than hoping and praying that somebody else messes up. We can execute, and drive, and pray that that’s enough.”
It's not lost on Humphries Armbruster and Jones that they're making history, being mothers and sledmates at the same time. Humphries Armbruster has a son a few months away from turning 2, and Jones is the mother of a 5-year-old.
Saturday is medal day, and for that sled, it could also be Mother's Day.
“We're doing everything we can,” Jones said. “We're doing everything humanly possible.”
___
AP Winter Olympics: https://apnews.com/hub/milan-cortina-2026-winter-olympics
