Kaysha Love is calling me (or better yet, Zooming me) from a truck parked at a train station somewhere in Europe, hunting for decent wifi. Which honestly feels like the perfect introduction to what she’s about to tell me about this sport (and also speaks to the level of determination she has in every area of her life).
Because here’s what nobody tells you about being an Olympic bobsledder: it’s not glamorous. At all.
“This sport is not really sexy and fun and all of those things,” Love says. “You are definitely on the road five months out of the year. You’re also this leader of needing to move your equipment, sand your equipment, and transport everything in your sprinter trucks.”
She’s 28, from Utah, and the reigning world champion in monobob (that’s the single-person bobsled event, for those of us whose only reference point is Cool Runnings). But before bobsled, Love spent 12 years as a Level 10 gymnast until injuries pushed her to track and field at UNLV, where she set Utah state records and earned All-American honors as a sprinter.
The Olympics had always been the dream. She grew up in an athletic family where everyone played college basketball or volleyball, and Olympic viewing was basically a family tradition. Then during her senior year at track nationals, a bobsled coach approached her and basically told her she was doing the wrong sport.
“I remember just thinking that he was crazy,” Love says. “I had been doing track for the last eight years.”
The coach kept pushing. Everything she learned in track would transfer to bobsled. Love, whose entire knowledge of the sport came from Cool Runnings, told him that’s all she knew. His response? Then she was perfect, because that movie taught her she belonged in this space and that track athletes make incredible bobsledders.
So she went to Lake Placid for a rookie camp. “I went up there [to Lake Placid] and absolutely just fell in love with the idea that I could become an Olympian. And about a year later, I ended up becoming an Olympian.”
The timeline is insane (in the best way possible) when you think about it. Love went from her first bobsled push to the 2022 Beijing Olympics in roughly 12 months, competing as a push athlete with only seven bobsled races under her belt.
“When I first came in before transitioning from brakeman to pilot, they told me that it was never done for a rookie to come in and make the Olympic team two years out from the games. It never happened. And when I came in, I made it in a year.”
Then Love decided to transition from brakeman to pilot—the person who actually steers the sled, and makes the split-second decisions that can mean the difference between winning and crashing. Coaches told her it would take four to eight years to see consistent top results.
“I won my first World Cup race my first year as a pilot. And then, two years later, I became a world champion.”
The mental game of piloting is intense. “When you’re a pilot, you are the leader on the team,” Love tells me. “One fraction of a decision can be the difference between a crash or winning.”
Her approach involves faith and leaning on her teammates. “I’m a God-fearing woman. And at the end of the day, I know that God has a plan for me, and everything that happens, whether good, bad, nothing is bad. Everything is a lesson.”
Unlike gymnastics or track, which Love describes as “very much an independent team sport,” bobsled is different. “In bobsled, it is very team-driven. And that was kind of a new thing for me that I wasn’t fully expecting, but it was something that I absolutely love about my sport.”
“When you’re sitting not even an inch away from your teammate, just the importance of smelling good is so real,” Love says, which makes her partnership with Native deodorant make sense. When the commercial launched while the team was competing in Latvia, Love says, “the entire bobsled community was just so ecstatic about this partnership.”
For Love, having products she can rely on matters. “As athletes, we’re really, really cautious and really particular about the products that we use, the products that we take because our bodies are our greatest tool and attribute to competing and trying to bring home medals.”
Native’s limited-edition Global Flavors collection, available exclusively at Target, features aluminum-free formulas in scents inspired by destinations around the world. Love’s favorite? The Italian vanilla gelato—fitting, since the 2026 Winter Olympics will be held in Milan-Cortina, Italy. “Before I even smelled it, before it wasn’t even vanilla, I was like, ‘Okay, the Italian flavor is going to be my favorite simply because the games are going to be in Italy.’ And it just so happened to be that it was also a vanilla flavor.”
Beyond the practical stuff, though, Love is thinking about legacy. About the Black women who made space for her in this sport—Elana Meyers Taylor, Lauren Gibbs, Aja Evans. “These were women that I was still competing with up until four or five years ago, and still competing with Elana Meyers Taylor,” Love says. “And to look at the impact that they had on U.S.A. bobsled and Team U.S.A. and Winter Olympics as a whole, it gives me goosebumps.”
“When people talk about Kaysha Love, I want them to look at me in that same light,” she says. “At the end of the day, if I don’t take the gold, I want to be the reason that the person that took gold could, like help uplift them.”
So what would she tell Black women who are chasing goals that feel unconventional or intimidating? “The more intimidating, the better. Honestly, you deserve this space, and don’t be fearful because it hasn’t been done before, because there hasn’t been a lot of us in this space or in the space that you’re trying to achieve, but just know that you belong.”
Love wants future athletes to ignore the supposed timelines that almost held her back. “I hope that when I retire, that there’s an athlete that maybe is hesitant about becoming a pilot or hesitant about sacrificing two or three years to become an Olympian because the timeline seems sketchy, that someone can say, ‘Hey, Kaysha loved it…she showed the way, that it is possible.'”
For now though, she’s got her own gold to chase. Come February in Milan-Cortina, we’ll be watching.