02/21/26 03:02:00
Printable Page
02/21 15:00 CST Laura Nolte secures Olympic bobsled gold, Kaillie Humphries
Armbruster wins 6th medal
Laura Nolte secures Olympic bobsled gold, Kaillie Humphries Armbruster wins 6th
medal
By TIM REYNOLDS
AP Sports Writer
CORTINA D'AMPEZZO, Italy (AP) --- Laura Nolte didn't let this lead get away.
She's golden, again.
And Kaillie Humphries Armbruster, in perhaps her Olympic bobsled finale, found
her way to the medal stand for a record-tying sixth time.
Nolte is now the back-to-back two-woman Olympic bobsled champion, holding off
teammate Lisa Buckwitz to grab gold at the Milan Cortina Games on Saturday
night.
Nolte --- the winner of the last four World Cup two-woman titles --- cemented
her status as the sport's current queen, teaming with Deborah Levi to win her
second consecutive two-woman gold medal by finishing four runs in 3 minutes,
48.46 seconds.
Buckwitz, with Neele Schuten in her sled, was second in 3:48.99. Humphries
Armbruster and Jasmine Jones --- two mothers in the same sled for the U.S. ---
finished third in 3:49.21. It was the sixth Olympic medal for Humphries
Armbruster, tying monobob gold medalist Elana Meyers Taylor for the most by any
woman in the sport's history.
Also for the U.S., Kaysha Love --- who has been dealing with a hamstring issue
for much of the season and had it flare up again in Italy --- and Azaria Hill
finished fifth in 3:49.71. Meyers Taylor and Jadin O'Brien, who were doomed by
a second-heat skid at the top of the track Friday night, got a few spots back
in the standings Saturday and finished tied for seventh in 3:50.49.
Germany now has six bobsled medals in these Olympics, while the U.S. has three
and the rest of the world has zero. The divide might get bigger on Sunday in
the final sliding event of the Milan Cortina Games; Germany, which already
swept the two-man race, is in position to do the same thing in four-man after
Saturday's opening two heats of that competition.
And Germany is now up to 17 sliding medals, counting bobsled, skeleton and
luge, at Milan Cortina --- one more than the rest of the world. Austria has
five, the U.S. now has four along with Italy, Britain has two and Latvia has
one.
The two-woman race was basically for the bronze going into the final run.
Nolte --- who had the lead, albeit a much smaller one, going into the final
heat of the monobob competition that Meyers Taylor ended up winning --- led
Buckwitz by 0.35 seconds going into the last heat. Buckwitz's lead over
Humphries Armbruster was 0.19 seconds, and Humphries Armbruster was only 0.09
seconds up on Germany's Kim Kalicki in the race for the bronze.
Kalicki's final time: 3:49.36. It wasn't enough to catch Humphries Armbruster,
who hopped out of the sled and wrapped herself and Jones in the American flag,
knowing the medal was theirs.
Humphries Armbruster's updated Olympic medal count: three golds, three bronzes.
Meyers Taylor is 41, Humphries Armbruster is 40. Meyers Taylor is a mother of
two, Humphries Armbruster has one son, and both women are talking about how
they would like to add another baby to their families.
That means Saturday night might have been the last on the Olympic stage for
them --- and maybe on any sliding stage.
It was the 177th race --- counting World Cups, world championships, the
short-lived monobob World Series and the Olympics --- for Meyers Taylor at the
major international level. She has 78 medals from those races, six of them
coming in the Olympics, and was a winner either as a driver or pusher in three
different decades.
And for Humphries Armbruster, who won three Olympic medals for Canada and now
has three more for the U.S., the numbers are even more gaudy: 105 medals in 218
major international races, with 49 of them victories.
If this is the end, for either or for both of them, what a ride it was.
___
AP Winter Olympics: https://apnews.com/hub/milan-cortina-2026-winter-olympics
|
