By Mitch Phillips
CORTINA D’AMPEZZO, Italy, Feb 16 (Reuters) – American Elana Meyers Taylor finally claimed an Olympic gold medal at the age of 41 on Monday when the mother of two snatched the Monobob bobsleigh title by four hundredths of a second to put the icing on an incredible career.
Germany’s Laura Nolte led going into the fourth and final run but lost ground on the tricky upper section and had to settle for silver ahead of American defending champion Kaillie Humphries.
Meyers Taylor had won three silver and two bronze medals in her previous four Olympic appearances and looked set for another minor medal until the final seconds of a nerve-shredding contest.
Nolte, a gold medallist in the Two-Woman in 2022, opened Monday’s proceedings with a 59.15 track record and it seemed the battle for gold was already over.
The vastly experienced Americans, however, were not about to give up that easily. Meyers Taylor steered superbly to immediately set another track record of 59.08 seconds – which Humphries, a youngster at 40 and also a mother, promptly matched.
That left double world champion Nolte only 0.15 ahead going into the final run.
Humphries, who had previously won two golds for Canada in the Two-Woman before switching allegiance, clocked 59.54, which proved enough for bronze, a long way clear of Germany’s Lisa Buckwitz.
Meyers Taylor then put down a smooth, but not extraordinary 59.51, seemingly leaving the door open for Nolte. However, the 27-year-old German clipped the wall early and then suffered another skid to lose ground and could not make it up at the finish as she clocked 59.70 – good enough only for silver.
Four years ago, in the first appearance at the Olympics of the only bobsleigh event where everyone uses the same, standard sled, Germany failed to make the podium, despite taking seven of the other nine bobsleigh medals available.
Since then Nolte has emerged as the number one, twice winning the world championship and topping the World Cup standings this year.
But on Monday the calm experience of Meyers Taylor, who won the first of four world championship team golds back in 2012, made the difference.
Rapper Flavor Flav, who sponsors US Bobsleigh and Skeleton and is their “official hype man”, was among the first to congratulate her as she leapt for joy at the finish area before hugging the older of her two children.
Last week she said that winning a gold medal “would mean everything and would mean nothing… there’s so much more to my life… at the end of the day, a gold medal is not going to change who I am.”
It did not look quite like that as she wrapped herself in the American flag beaming like a teenager.
(Reporting by Mitch Phillips, editing by Christian Radnedge and Toby Davis)
Comments