COVID isolation takes flag out of Elana Meyers Taylor's hands for Opening Ceremony

BEIJING — Elana Meyers Taylor spent the opening day of the 2022 Olympics confined to a few-foot-wide crevice of an unfamiliar hotel room, with half-unpacked clothes and bulging duffel bags infringing on the only workout space she has.

She arrived at these Games hoping they’d be hers, eyeing an elusive gold medal, perhaps even two. Perhaps, she dreamed, a storybook ending to a shimmering career that would send her off into the sunset. Her husband and nearly 2-year-old son could come along for the ride.

Then she tested positive for COVID-19, and now she spends her days alone, shuffling up and down the pseudo-runway between bed and TV, simulating bobsled pushes by pumping her legs and driving her palms into a desk that’s up against a wall and won’t move. She isn’t allowed to leave this isolation facility. It offers a nondescript view of a red-doored building and dingy courtyard, and not much else. She sometimes cracks the window for fresh air. It’s frigid.

Her son and father are two doors down, having also tested positive. Her husband, Nic, did too, and is next door, designing hotel-room workouts. The hope is that they’ll sharpen Meyers Taylor for her first of two Olympic events, the Feb. 13 monobob. She has, at her disposal, just enough floor space to stretch; a foam roller and massage gun to stay loose; an exercise bike as of Wednesday, a dumbbell as of Thursday and a barbell as of Friday. But, of course, not a bobsled track. Or access to coaching. Or the ability to carry a red, white and blue flag in Friday’s Opening Ceremony, as her Team USA mates wanted her to.

None of that, however, is the most difficult part of chasing gold in isolation. None of it compares to what the Taylors have endured over the years, either. Nic reminded Elana of this on Thursday. She thought about the emergency rooms; the surgeries; the neonatal intensive care unit. She overcame all of it and more to win World Cup titles last month, and knows she can overcome COVID, too. Negative tests on Wednesday and Friday — albeit with a Thursday positive sandwiched in between — suggests her body and three vaccine doses are fending off the virus. She’s “cautiously optimistic” that she’s close to clearing protocols, and “if I get on the track,” she said Thursday, “I'll be fine.”

But when Nic reminded her of their persevering precedent, she reminded him why this is different, why this week has been uniquely agonizing. In the past, “we’ve always done it together,” she said. “I could always reach out and grab my husband's hand, or I could always reach out and grab Nico, or reach out and touch him.

“This is the first time where we're going through something incredibly hard where I can't reach out and touch him.”

Almost lost the passion for bobsledding

Nico, who has brought more joy to Meyers Taylor’s life than any medal ever could, was born two years ago this month via emergency C-section. He spent the first week of his life in the NICU, fighting. Doctors diagnosed him with profound hearing loss and Down syndrome.

And there was a moment, a distinct moment during that nightmarish week, when Meyers Taylor thought that returning to bobsled would be impossible.

She’d already taken a season off to have Nico. As much as she tried to stay connected to the sport, she sensed it moving on without her. She felt “no longer relevant.” After he was born, she knew she’d pour as much love and energy into him as possible, and, she admitted, “I didn't know how it would all work out.” There were days she’d rise early with Nico for doctor’s appointments and wonder how she’d have it in her to train. When the pandemic hit, three weeks after Nico was born, she wondered how garage workouts could possibly lead her back to her Olympian self.

“I’m not as fast or as strong as I once was,” she wrote three months post-pregnancy. “I’m out of shape. I’m carrying around extra weight. My hips are a little wider. Things jiggle that never jiggled before. Nothing feels the same.”

Not even the sled. When she first returned to ice, it felt foreign.

But during the pregnancy, she’d challenged herself, to push and push and push, and find out what was possible as a mom in this grueling sport. And although she didn’t win a race in her first season back, she proved to herself she could do it. She could jam training and sled work and sports med appointments, and Nico time and meals and bedtime lullabies, and breastfeeding and surprises and sleep, all into a single day. Yeah, there’d be “mom guilt,” especially when she heads off to morning training sessions before Nico opens his eyes. But she could do it.

This past season, just a year after her return, she returned to her best. She claimed five wins across bobsled’s two women’s disciplines, and both overall titles. After a bronze and two silvers at the past three Olympics, she entered these Games, the first with a second women’s bobsled event, as a favorite for at least one gold.

Then came the call from a USA Bobsled and Skeleton staffer, and then the ambulance, and isolation. It would be easy, one might think, to start asking why. Why her? Why now? Why, after all Meyers Taylor had conquered, and after all she’d done to avoid this one thing that protocols make unconquerable, had it come for her at what seemed like the worst possible time?

But she isn’t asking those questions. In an interview, on social media, and even on her own time, she has remained upbeat.

Motherhood and Nico, she said, have taught her to celebrate small wins and appreciate small things, and that’s what she’s been doing. The exercise bike delivery enthused her. Supportive messages encouraged her. Even the staff at the isolation facility, working through language barriers and around the clock to ferry breast milk from her room to Nico’s, have made her appreciative. And being voted an Opening Ceremony flag bearer by her peers?

It isn’t, in her mind, another thing COVID has taken from her. It’s an honor.

Holding out hope to return

She has, of course, envisioned what it would be like to walk into the Bird’s Nest with that oversize flag. She would’ve tried to bring Nico with her. Whether or not organizers would have vetoed her idea, she would have beamed.

Instead, she watched on TV as speedskater Brittany Bowe carried that flag in her place.

She’ll need consecutive negative tests to clear quarantine after 10 days. She’s confident she’ll get them before the two-woman bobsled competition begins on Feb. 18.

She knows there is no guarantee she gets them before Feb. 13, the date of monobob’s Olympic debut, and that, to put it bluntly, sucks.

But she isn’t ruing anything. She’s primed her brain to cling to positivity.

"COVID's taken a lot more from other people than it has from me,” she said. “So I'm extremely blessed."