"I want my boys to know that my dreams and my hopes and opportunities weren't limited because of them," Elana Meyers Taylor told ABC News
Elana Meyers Taylor/Instagram; Team USA/Instagram
NEED TO KNOW
- As if being an Olympic athlete wasn’t already challenging enough, these moms are seemingly doing the impossible
- Several moms competing at the 2026 Winter Olympics opened up to ABC News’ Maggie Rulli for a Good Morning America cover story about balancing rigorous training schedules with the responsibility of raising young children
- It’s a commitment that they each say is worth it, so they can have their children cheering them on
As if being an Olympic athlete wasn't already challenging enough, these moms are seemingly doing the impossible.
Several moms competing at the 2026 Winter Olympics opened up to ABC News' Maggie Rulli for a Good Morning America cover story about balancing rigorous training schedules with the responsibility of raising young children. It's a commitment that they each say is worth it, so they can have their children cheering them on.
Elana Meyers Taylor, a U.S. bobsledder who's the most decorated Black Winter Olympian of all time, is currently competing for the gold in Milan. As a mom of two boys with disabilities, Noah, 3, and Nico, 5, Taylor is juggling a lot at one time. The doting mom told Rulli that returning to training after giving birth was nothing short of a challenge.
"I never really felt like I made it back," she said, noting that getting an epidural years ago continues to give her back pain. "I don't know if my body will ever be the same, but it's okay. I can still do what I need to do."
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Taylor decided to push through her pain and get her body ready to compete to show her sons that her abilities weren't limited because she decided to have them.
"I want my boys to know that my dreams and my hopes and opportunities weren't limited because of them," she told the outlet.
In addition to navigating their busy calendars, moms also have to schedule things, like their pregnancies, around their sports cycle. Olympic curlers and sisters Tara and Tabitha Peterson spoke with the outlet about navigating postpartum recovery, while also preparing their bodies to compete on one of the world's largest stages.
"I had the baby, [Tabitha] was still pregnant, but we needed to keep competing," Tara Peterson, whose son is now 17 months old, told ABC News. Tabitha Peterson, whose daughter just started walking, said she returned to training "about five weeks postpartum."
"And you know, the hormones are still flowing through your body," she said of the experience, adding, "You kind of just do what you've got to do."
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Kendall Coyne Schofield, a women's hockey player whose son Drew is 2½ years old, told the outlet that her son was her sole motivation for competing after becoming a mom.
"I had a vision and a goal of him not getting older and looking back and seeing when my hockey career ended, and that being 2023, the same year he was born," she said.
She continued, "I want him to know that mommy kept going, and he was the reason I kept going."
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