Hill\u2019s father Virgil<\/a>, a boxer, earned a silver medal at the 1984 Summer Games<\/a>. Hill\u2019s mother, Denean Howard<\/a>, met Virgil at the 1984 Games and won Olympic gold that year running with her sister, Sherri Howard<\/a>, in the 4×400-meter relay. The sisters won silver medals in the 4×400 at the 1988 Olympics before Denean earned another silver at the 1992 Games.<\/p>\n \u201cAt a very young age, since I could understand what the Olympics were and knew what my family did as Olympians, I knew that\u2019s something that I wanted to do and wanted to experience,\u201d Hill said.<\/p>\n But her top marks of 11.70 seconds in the 100 meters and 23.93 in the 200 didn\u2019t rank in the top 100 for U.S. women in 2021, her senior year at Nevada Las Vegas. So if she was going to continue the family tradition, she knew she\u2019d have to find another sport.<\/p>\n Jadin O\u2019Brien was in a similar fix. She won two NCAA titles in the pentathlon but finished seventh at the U.S. trials ahead of the 2024 Games. To realize her Olympic dream, she\u2019d have to change sports too.<\/p>\n Luckily for both women, there was a well-worn path from the track to the Winter Olympics: Just hop onto a sled. On Friday, Hill and O\u2019Brien will complete their journeys when the two-woman bobsled competition gets underway at the Cortina Sliding Centre.<\/p>\n \u201cI never thought that this would even be a possibility or an opportunity,\u201d Hill said. \u201cIt just kind of fell into my lap and I was really good at it. I stuck it out and worked hard and here I am a Winter Olympian.\u201d<\/p>\n She has Kaysha Love, a UNLV teammate, to thank for that. An 11-time high school track champion in Utah, Love was encouraged by her college coach to take part in a 12-day bobsled rookie camp after COVID shortened the track season her senior year. That led to more auditions and 14 months later she and pilot Kaillie Humphries won a World Cup race.<\/p>\n U.S. bobsledders Azaria Hill, left, and Kaysha Love take part in a training run Wednesday in Cortina d\u2019Ampezzo, Italy.<\/p>\n (Aijaz Rahi \/ Associated Press)<\/p>\n After just six races, Love made the 2022 U.S. Olympic team as a brakewoman. She then tried to sell Hill on the sport.<\/p>\n \u201cShe was like \u2018I think you should try it. Let\u2019s see if you can do it,\u2019\u201d Hill remembered. \u201cI went to my first rookie camp and I did really well, got invited back to some more camps, and ended up making my first World Cup team.\u201d<\/p>\n That was in December 2023. Two years later she made it to the Olympics as the brakewoman for Love, who is now a driver.<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s completely opposite of what I thought I\u2019d be doing,\u201d Hill said. \u201cThe first time it is definitely scary. I was like, \u2018I don\u2019t know if I can do this. I don\u2019t know if I even want to do this.\u2019 It is an acquired taste.<\/p>\n \u201cBut Keisha Love was just super positive.\u201d<\/p>\n O\u2019Brien\u2019s rise to Olympian in the two-person bobsled, the second-fastest sliding sport of the Winter Games, has been even swifter. Elana Meyers Taylor, a five-time Olympian and five-time medalist, began recruiting O\u2019Brien to be her brakewoman after the Beijing Games. At first she resisted, but last summer O\u2019Brien decided she needed a rest from track \u201cand bobsled seemed like a good alternative, so I took it up.\u201d<\/p>\n Jadin O\u2019Brien, left, and Elana Meyers Taylor prepare for a bobsled training run at the Milan-Cortina Olympic Games on Wednesday.<\/p>\n (Aijaz Rahi \/ Associated Press)<\/p>\n In her World Cup debut four months later, O\u2019Brien pushed Taylor to a fourth-place finish, earning a spot on the Olympic team.<\/p>\n \u201cThere was so much I needed to learn,\u201d she said. \u201cLuckily there were quite a few girls who were very patient with me, who helped me understand the sport, understand form.\u201d<\/p>\n One of the most important things she had to learn is when to pull the brake.<\/p>\n \u201cIf you do it too early, then you\u2019re going to drastically hurt your time. If you do it too late, there\u2019s a chance you\u2019re going to ruin the runners because the track ends at a certain point,\u201d O\u2019Brien said.<\/p>\n And that decision has to be made in a heartbeat at the end of a mile-long ice chute covered at speeds exceeding 90 mph.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s terrifying. You\u2019re going super, super fast. As a brakeman you can\u2019t see what\u2019s going on because your head is down,\u201d she said. \u201cBut at the same time it\u2019s very thrilling. You feel like you\u2019re flying if the run is done right. It\u2019s almost addicting.\u201d<\/p>\n Track athletes like Hill, 27, and O\u2019Brien, 23, have a long history of success in bobsled, where speed and power at the start are important. Lauryn Williams<\/a> won a gold medal on the track in the 2012 London Games<\/a> and a silver on the back of Taylor\u2019s sled two years later in Sochi. Lolo Jones<\/a> won three world championships on the track and two in a bobsled. Most of the Jamaican team in Cortina is made up of sprinters who couldn\u2019t catch Usain Bolt<\/a>, so they climbed in a bobsled instead.<\/p>\n \u201cThey\u2019ve got just an athleticism that is very applicable to pushing sleds,\u201d said Curtis Tomasevicz, a former football player at Nebraska who won gold and silver Olympic medals in the four-man bobsled before becoming a coach with the U.S. team. \u201cWe\u2019re recruiting athletes that have a sprinting ability and we feel like we can teach them to be bobsledders in a short amount of time.\u201d<\/p>\n For Hill, that transition from the sprints to a sled has allowed her to carry on a family tradition. And she\u2019ll have 11 relatives \u2014 including two Olympic medalists \u2014 at the Cortina Sliding Centre on Friday when she creates her own memories as the first Hill to compete in the Winter Games.<\/p>\n \u201cThey\u2019re super excited seeing me on this journey, being that I\u2019ve been able to kind of follow my own mission, create something for myself,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s almost like they\u2019re kind of experiencing it again, but just in a different way.<\/p>\n \u201cThis has definitely exceeded my expectations of what I thought being an Olympian would be. It\u2019s so much fun.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"CORTINA D’AMPEZZO, Italy\u00a0\u2014\u00a0In some families, children are expected to attend the same college as their parents or root…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":184521,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[87098,87102,1431,10678,19609,87099,87100,48,52,51,47,50,49,10012,87101,19930,7496,36465,315,2829,72],"class_list":{"0":"post-184520","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-los-angeles","8":"tag-azaria-hill","9":"tag-brakewoman","10":"tag-family","11":"tag-games","12":"tag-gold-medal","13":"tag-jadin-obrien","14":"tag-kaysha-love","15":"tag-la","16":"tag-la-headlines","17":"tag-la-news","18":"tag-los-angeles","19":"tag-los-angeles-headlines","20":"tag-los-angeles-news","21":"tag-olympics","22":"tag-silver-medal","23":"tag-speed","24":"tag-sport","25":"tag-taylor","26":"tag-time","27":"tag-track","28":"tag-year"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184520","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=184520"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184520\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/184521"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=184520"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=184520"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=184520"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"U.S.](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/1771503909_204_.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n![\"Jadin](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/1771503909_394_.jpeg\")
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