American Kaillie Humphries Armbruster, in perhaps her Olympic bobsled finale, found her way to the medal stand for a record-tying sixth time Saturday in the two-woman bobsled, while Germany’s Laura Nolte won gold again.
Nolte is now the back-to-back two-woman Olympic bobsled champion, holding off teammate Lisa Buckwitz to grab gold at the Milan Cortina Games on Saturday night.
Nolte — the winner of the last four World Cup two-woman titles — cemented her status as the sport’s current queen, teaming with Deborah Levi to win her second consecutive two-woman gold medal by finishing four runs in 3 minutes, 48.46 seconds.
Buckwitz, with Neele Schuten in her sled, was second in 3:48.99. Humphries Armbruster and Jasmine Jones — two mothers in the same sled for the U.S. — finished third in 3:49.21. It was the sixth Olympic medal for Humphries Armbruster, tying fellow American Elana Meyers Taylor for the most by any woman in the sport’s history.
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Also for the U.S., Kaysha Love — who has been dealing with a hamstring issue for much of the season and had it flare up again in Italy — and Azaria Hill finished fifth in 3:49.71. Meyers Taylor and Jadin O’Brien, who were doomed by a second-heat skid at the top of the track Friday night, got a few spots back in the standings Saturday and finished tied for seventh in 3:50.49.
Germany now has six bobsled medals in these Olympics, while the U.S. has three and the rest of the world has zero. The divide might get bigger on Sunday in the final sliding event of the Milan Cortina Games; Germany, which already swept the two-man race, is in position to do the same thing in four-man after Saturday’s opening two heats of that competition.
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And Germany is now up to 17 sliding medals, counting bobsled, skeleton and luge, at Milan Cortina — one more than the rest of the world. Austria has five, the U.S. now has four along with Italy, Britain has two and Latvia has one.
The two-woman race was basically for the bronze going into the final run.
Nolte — who had the lead, albeit a much smaller one, going into the final heat of the monobob competition that Meyers Taylor ended up winning — led Buckwitz by 0.35 seconds going into the last heat. Buckwitz’s lead over Humphries Armbruster was 0.19 seconds, and Humphries Armbruster was only 0.09 seconds up on Germany’s Kim Kalicki in the race for the bronze.
Kalicki’s final time: 3:49.36. It wasn’t enough to catch Humphries Armbruster, who hopped out of the sled and wrapped herself and Jones in the American flag, knowing the medal was theirs.
Humphries Armbruster’s updated Olympic medal count: three golds, three bronzes.
Meyers Taylor is 41, Humphries Armbruster is 40. Meyers Taylor is a mother of two, Humphries Armbruster has one son, and both women are talking about how they would like to add another baby to their families.
That means Saturday night might have been the last on the Olympic stage for them — and maybe on any sliding stage.
It was the 177th race — counting World Cups, world championships, the short-lived monobob World Series and the Olympics — for Meyers Taylor at the major international level. She has 78 medals from those races, six of them coming in the Olympics, and was a winner either as a driver or pusher in three different decades.
And for Humphries Armbruster, who won three Olympic medals for Canada and now has three more for the U.S., the numbers are even more gaudy: 105 medals in 218 major international races, with 49 of them victories.
If this is the end, for either or for both of them, what a ride it was.
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