For San Diego bobsledder Kaillie Humphries, things have changed a bit since winning a gold medal at the 2022 Winter Games. Training with her new son brings a new outlook to the competition. NBC 7’s Steven Luke reports.
Five-time Olympic bobsledder Kaillie Humphries is one of her sport's most dominant and recognizable stars but her training for the 2026 Milan Olympics marks new territory in her decades-long pursuit of greatness on the icy track.
Humphries became a 1st-time mom last summer when she delivered a baby boy named Aulden and her Winter Olympics training has never been more busy or interesting.
Humphries -- who has four Olympic medals in bobsled and is the defending monobob gold medalist -- has proven she is among the best in the world in this sport. Now, she is traveling Europe with her husband and son to perfect another skill: multi-tasking, which is something moms know all about.
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"He still wakes up two to three times a night. I'm still breastfeeding. Between races, even now in competition, my husband will bring him up and I'm in the start house trying to feed him and getting prepared for the next race about to happen," Humphries said.
While Humphries' new role makes her career a bit more challenging, Humphries never loses sight of the blessing given her tough path to pregnancy.
She and her husband went through rounds of In vitro fertilization for two years. She was diagnosed with stage 4 endometriosis, a disease that makes it difficult to get pregnant. From multiple egg retrievals to failed embryo transfers and a miscarriage, the lows were gut-wrenching.
"To have to go through the IVF process and not know if it was ever going to happen and doubt that process and have it fail multiple times, you do question if it was meant for me if it was ever going to happen," Humphries said.
Like any world-class athlete, she'd encountered setbacks before -- during training and competition. Humphries says her mental fortitude as an Olympian was something she drew upon to stay positive and hopeful during the IVF process.
"For my husband and myself, the IVF process was the exact same. We knew we were never going to give up. We were going to give it everything we had for as long as we could. There were plenty of ups and downs, but we were successful and we now have a son. It's pretty awesome," she said.
As the Winter Olympic countdown clock starts moving faster and faster towards February of 2026 when the world's best winter athletes will descend on Italy, there are already competitions this winter season that matter. Olympic qualifiers don't pause for postpartum recovery, meaning this bobsledding great must fast-track her "mom bod" into "monobob" shape for a chance to represent Team USA next winter.
She calls it the transformation of her second Olympic body.
Humphries will return to San Diego in the late spring and spend the summer soaking up the sunshine near her South Bay home while sprinting and weight lifting. Her goal is to become the first female bobsledder to win two golds at the same games. To do that, she needs to defend her title in the women's monobob and recapture gold in the traditional two-woman sled.
She turns 40 later this year marking another personal milestone. It's a pursuit she calls both challenging and liberating at the same time. She is living her biggest dream in life while chasing Olympic history on the bobsled track.
