Elana Meyers Taylor

Elana Meyers Taylor is a four-time World Champion, eight-time World Championships medalist, five-time Winter Olympian medalist and 2015 World Cup Champion in bobsled. With her two medals in the 2022 Olympic Games, Meyers Taylor became the most decorated Black athlete in Winter Olympics history. Meyers Taylor also has collected more medals than any man or woman in Olympic bobsledding. She also became the oldest American woman to medal in Winter Olympics history.

The daughter of a professional football player, Meyers Taylor was born in Oceanside, California, but grew up in Douglasville, Georgia. A naturally gifted athlete across many sports, she was drawn to softball and at 9 years old she declared her intention to become an Olympian. She attended George Washington University on a softball scholarship and went on to play professionally for the Mid-Michigan Ice.

In the summer of 2007 she made the trip to Lake Placid, N.Y., home of the US National Bobsled Team. She never left. Meyers Taylor turned out to be an incredibly powerful brakeman and less than three years later she stood on the podium in Vancouver as an Olympic bronze medalist.

Post Vancouver, Meyers Taylor decided to take the wheel, or in the case of bobsled, the ‘D-rings’, and transition to the role of driver. Not long thereafter she became a regular on medals podiums around the world and eventually drove herself all the way back to the Olympic podium in 2014, this time in Sochi, Russia, and this time for silver.

In 2015, Meyers Taylor made history, becoming the first woman to earn a spot on the U.S. National Team competing with the men as a four-man bobsled pilot. She went on to become the first woman to win a medal in international competition in a men’s event. She won the 2015 World Championships in the women’s two-man event, the first woman in U.S. history to do so. That season she also won six of eight World Cup races and became the Overall World Cup Champion.

Meyers Taylor is partnered with the Women’s Sports Foundation, where serves on the Foundation’s Athlete Advisory Panel and travels the country sharing her passion for sports and equality with girls in our Sports 4 Life and GoGirlGo! funded programs. She served a six-year term as an athlete director on the USA Bobsled and Skeleton Board of Directors and is currently a mentor for Classroom Champions. Recently, George Washington University honored her with an honorary doctorate degree.

In 2018, at the Olympic Games in Pyeongchang, Meyers Taylor battled back and forth with Team Germany over the four heat Olympic competition, missing the gold medal by just .07.