By TIM REYNOLDS
CORTINA D’AMPEZZO, Italy (AP) — Jadin O’Brien thought she was being scammed.
The Milan Cortina Olympics — and the sport of bobsled, for that matter — were not anywhere near O’Brien’s radar a couple years ago, when the Notre Dame track and field star saw that someone sent her a direct message on Instagram. The message was ignored.
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Several months later, the same person slid into O’Brien’s DMs again. “We would love to have you tryout for bobsled!!!” That was the entirety of the message.
O’Brien, finally, was intrigued. She replied and asked for information. A month and a half later, in mid-August of last year, she drove 12 1/2 hours from Notre Dame to Lake Placid, New York, to see what bobsled was all about.
And now, she’s an Olympian.
It is a story perhaps like none other in these Olympics: A rookie, who has raced only twice in her career, is going to compete on the sport’s biggest stage with a very real chance of finding her way to the Olympic medal stand. O’Brien will push for Olympic monobob gold medalist Elana Meyers Taylor — the person who sent those DMs — on Friday and Saturday in the two-woman competition at Cortina.
“It has really been a roller-coaster of events,” O’Brien said. “Everything’s happened so fast, but … I’ve kind of been conditioned to be able to handle new things very, very fast and then perform despite a lack of experience. So, it has been a whirlwind. I could never have predicted my life would turn out this way, but I’m incredibly grateful and I’ve loved every second of it.”
The Olympics have been on her wish list for a while.
The Winter Olympics, not so much.
How she got here
The 23-year-old O’Brien was a star at Notre Dame — the 2023, 2024 and 2025 national champion in the indoor pentathlon, a five-time All-Atlantic Coast Conference first team pick, a 10-time All-American and a winner of at least a half-dozen All-Academic honors along the way. She was 12th in the Olympic heptathlon trials for the Tokyo Games in 2021 and seventh in the trials for the Paris Games in 2024.
Last summer, she was fifth at the U.S. championships. Two days later, she started training for bobsled. She wound up making that drive to Lake Placid, hit the push track and was pushing with — and in some cases, better than — the team’s best in less than two weeks.
A star was born.
“It was insane,” Meyers Taylor said. “Not to get too patriotic or whatever, but I think bobsled is one of those traditionally American stories, American dream kind of stories because you can come from nowhere and come in and make an Olympic team. You could come from whatever background and have an opportunity to live your Olympic moment. That’s not true in a lot of sports.”
United States’ Elana Meyers Taylor, right, and her pusher Jadin O’Brien prepare to start for a two women bobsled training sessionat the 2026 Winter Olympics, in Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy, Wednesday, Feb. 18, 2026. (AP Photo/Aijaz Rahi)
Oh, O’Brien has a story. It was not always a fairytale. Far from it, actually.
Around the age of 5, the entire demeanor of a bubbly little girl — whose mother, a track coach, would set up makeshift hurdles in the basement of their Wisconsin home and watch Jadin leap over them with ease, clearly suggesting she had serious track potential — changed. And nobody knew why.
She couldn’t run. She couldn’t smile. She didn’t want to be around other kids. Anxiety took over, her mind often drifted to the darkest possible places such as her own death or the deaths of those around her. Her family, devout believers in their Catholic faith, even enlisted the help of an exorcist from their Archdiocese. It took years to figure out the cause.
In time, she was diagnosed with Pediatric Autoimmune Neuropsychiatric Disorders Associated with Streptococcal Infections — a rare syndrome known as PANDAS. When she was 10, life started to get normal again.
“My story, with everything I’ve gone through, is one of resilience,” O’Brien said. “I know I have the drive and the willpower to do some amazing things, and I try to glorify God while doing it.”
There’s been a lot of winning over O’Brien’s life. But overcoming PANDAS doesn’t mean the road has been easy. Her college career was marred by a series of injuries and challenges — badly torn quadricep muscles, hamstring issues, a stress fracture in her leg, a sprained hand (which isn’t ideal for someone who needs to throw a shot put in competition), even food poisoning on the eve of an NCAA championship meet.
And then, last month in St. Moritz, Switzerland, her bobsled career took its first very bad turn.
A bad crash nearly changes everything
O’Brien’s first crash came in January, during a training run in St. Moritz. She and Meyers Taylor were a few days away from their World Cup race when their sled toppled. All bobsled crashes are severe, on some level.
This one was worse than most.
The front axle came off the sled, all control was lost and Meyers Taylor and O’Brien were being thrown around like crash test dummies. O’Brien remembers not being able to move for a few moments, wondering if she was critically injured. Her season — her Olympic shot — could have ended right there.
They raced four days later.
United States’ Elana Meyers Taylor, right, and her pusher Jadin O’Brien prepare to start for a two women bobsled training sessionat the 2026 Winter Olympics, in Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy, Wednesday, Feb. 18, 2026. (AP Photo/Aijaz Rahi)
O’Brien isn’t sure how; her back was still extremely sore, and the back is sort of important for a bobsled push athlete.
“It was not easy getting back on the line to race in St. Moritz after that,” O’Brien said. “We were both very, very beat up. I decided to put my body on the line for E because I felt that I had the best chance of getting her a top-10 finish. And I said, ‘You know what? Regardless of this helps or hurts me when it comes to Olympic decision-making, who’s on the team, I’m not going to let a regret linger in my mind.’ And so, I chose to compete.”
A week later, the U.S. selection committee met to decide who would race in Cortina. The pilots — Meyers Taylor, Kaillie Humphries Armbruster and Kaysha Love — were all Olympic locks. A pair of push athletes — Jasmine Jones (who’ll race with Humphries Armbruster) and Azaria Hill (who’ll race with Love) — were pretty much considered to be locks as well. That left three women for one push spot, and O’Brien got the nod.
“I had no idea that I was going to be named to the team. I really didn’t,” O’Brien said. “And I remember sitting there and just praying, ‘Lord, if this is your will, please let it happen.’”
Inside a conference room at an airport hotel in Munich, U.S. bobsled coach Chris Fogt announced the pairings. Humphries Armbruster and Jones were the first duo he revealed. Hill and Love were next. And then he said, “Elana and Jadin.”
“My mouth, like, dropped,” O’Brien said.
The track star with the U.S. flag on the wall of her apartment in South Bend, Indiana — someone who spent years dreaming of a Summer Games medal — was headed to the Winter Olympics.
The future
Whatever happens this weekend — a medal is absolutely within O’Brien’s reach, especially with Meyers Taylor coming off the monobob gold — the track star expects to go back to track, at some point.
She plans to continue in bobsled as well.
It’s amazing how much things have changed for O’Brien in the span of about six months. From answering that DM from Meyers Taylor, to making the Olympic team, to watching her pilot win gold and now getting the chance to compete, it has truly been a whirlwind she never saw coming.
And now, she hopes, it’s time to win.
“We have a job to do and so I think once the job is done, once we accomplish what we came here to do, then it’ll sink in,” O’Brien said. “I’m very much an advocate for not getting carried away with excitement and staying level. Once we finish our job, then I think it’ll hit way more than it is now.”
AP Winter Olympics: https://apnews.com/hub/milan-cortina-2026-winter-olympics
