Team USA Moms on Training for Gold While Raising a Family

At the Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games Milano Cortina 2026, Team USA athletes were chasing medals they had imagined for years — gold, silver, bronze resting cool against their chests. They trained endless hours in dark early mornings and quiet late nights for that moment on the podium.

But for many of these dedicated female athletes, the space over their hearts has already been claimed by something else: smaller arms that wrap around their necks and call them “Mom.”

In Italy, motherhood didn’t sit on the sidelines. It stood at the start line.

For Paralympic curler Laura Dwyer, the path to Cortina began 14 years earlier in a hospital room. She was 34, newly injured, with two young sons at home. Weeks away from them in the hospital weighed heavily.

“All I thought was guilt for not being home,” she says now. A physical therapist helped reframe her focus: the best thing she could do for her children was to focus on healing herself. “Do the work on yourself so you can go home stronger.”

Raised on a farm as one of seven children, Dwyer approached rehab with grit. “Challenge accepted,” she said. She checked every box and was released four weeks earlier than expected. “I needed to be the best me so I could be the best mom.”

Eight years later, her Paralympic journey began at a curling clinic in her hometown of Wisconsin. Likening it to shuffleboard, she enjoyed it, but didn’t know how serious she would get. That all changed six years ago when the national coach emailed with a simple question: “How would you like to become a Paralympian?”

By the Paralympic Winter Games Beijing 2022, she was named the first female alternate and then represented the U.S. at the next three world championships in the mixed team competition. At Milano Cortina 2026, she represented Team USA in mixed doubles as the event made its Paralympic debut.

Dwyer, now 48, admitted that when she first got into the sport, she overcompensated at home. Before early training trips, she filled the refrigerator, prepped meals and organized schedules — “all my quote-unquote mom stuff” — to make her absence seamless. When she returned to untouched food and stories of Taco Bell, she laughed and recognized that her family was doing just fine.

“That’s what family is,” she said. “Everyone puts a little effort in and communicates a little harder.”

In Italy, she had her family by her side — her husband of 22 years, her parents, her sister, and one of her sons, a college football player recently cleared after surgery. Though her older son, now serving as a Marine, couldn’t attend, she still felt his presence.

“You work toward a goal you pour your heart and soul into, and then you show up for it,” she said. “That’s what we’re all doing.”

Olympic skeleton athlete Kelly Curtis, 37, understands that balance. After competing at her first Games during the COVID-19 pandemic, she said this Olympics “almost felt like a first.” This time, there were fans in the stands — including her two-year-old daughter, Maeve.

“It means the world,” Curtis says.

The months after childbirth were grueling for Curtis. She described her early FIS World Cup races as a “treacherous postpartum welcome back.” Sleep-deprived and fighting for ranking points, she competed against the best women in the world. There were moments when quitting felt like the right answer. But by the second half of the season, she felt her old edge returning.

“For me just to be in the mix at any point, I was just so happy to be back,” she said.

Back — not despite motherhood, but alongside it.

At the same sliding center, bobsledder Elana Meyers Taylor rocketed down the monobob track and into history, earning her first Olympic gold and the sixth medal of her career at 41 years old. At the bottom of the track, she made headlines when she was seen celebrating with fellow bobsledder and Olympic weightlifter Macy Lynn, who nannied her two young sons, Nico and Noah, both of whom were born deaf.

She credited her support system every step of the way.

The victory caps years at the top of her sport, yet the most decorated female bobsledder framed it simply. “It’s been such a journey,” she said. Her children kept her grounded. “At the end of the day, they’re the most important thing.”

Mom life is never far from her mind, even when processing the new accessory around her neck. “It’s everything and nothing,” she said. “I’ve got school pickups and drop-offs. I have more bling around my neck.” But that’s not what’s important to her boys. For them, the priority? “They simply want to be cuddled.”

Her family was in Europe from November through the end of February for the world cup season and the Olympic Winter Games Milano Cortina 2026. Hotels blurred together. When travel was starting to wear on her youngest, she told him, “You’ve got six days, kid, and you’ll be home.”

She draws a clear line in the snow: If bobsled ever becomes too much for her family, she will step away. That clarity stripped the pressure for the podium. When she drives to gold, her children are woven into every push and turn.

For Olympic bobsledder Kaillie Armbruster Humphries, she added two bronze medals to her legacy in a career that has spanned five Olympic Games. Yet one of her toughest moments came off the track from a different part of her legacy: The first time in a year and a half she didn’t sleep in the same room as her son, Aulden.

“It was weird,” she said. Even with her parents, in-laws and her supportive husband present, she felt the pull of separation. “I know he’s in good hands, and I get to focus on being an athlete right now. But there will be times when athlete life takes a backseat, and I get to be a full-time mom. And I’m excited.”

For years, she internalized a message common in high-performance sport: Once you become a mom, your body changes and you never fully get it back. “I grew up believing that,” she said. It is one reason she delayed motherhood. Now, standing with medals around her neck, she wants to widen the path for others. “If they want both, they can have both.”

That widening path is no longer built on belief alone. In 2025, the United States Olympic & Paralympic Foundation launched the Women’s Fund — a groundbreaking initiative designed to provide hardship assistance and pregnancy health benefits to Team USA women. It represents a structural acknowledgment that motherhood is not a detour from excellence, but part of it.

The Women’s Fund reframes what it means to support elite performance. It recognizes athletes as whole people — with families, bodies that change, and lives that continue beyond the field of play. Access to pregnancy health resources and financial support during critical life transitions allows athletes to remain in sport without sacrificing their well-being or their families’ stability.

Community support through the Team USA Fund remains essential to helping Team USA athletes thrive.

For Dwyer, community support is essential. At her final training camp, an older woman from her club hugged her and said how proud they were already of her. The moment made Dwyer emotional because it echoed what she tells her sons: Did you give it your all? Did you play hard? Be proud of the effort.

Nowadays, she repeats those words to herself.

On the ice and on the track, these women compete with ferocity. They chase medals — and win them. But the deeper victory hums beneath the surface.

They are proof, as Dwyer put it, that “you can also put yourself on the front burner and say, I am important, too.”

In Milano Cortina, Team USA’s moms didn’t choose between ambition and affection. They strung them together. They pushed sleds and curled stones. They wiped tears and answered late-night calls. They showed their children — watching from stands, bases, dorm rooms, and living rooms across an ocean — what it looks like to keep a promise to yourself.

They say they would go for it.

And in the bright cold of Italy, they did.

For more information about the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Foundation, visit give.teamusa.org (or click here to make a gift).