Kaillie Humphries was chasing two dreams.
Pursuing one, however, could have meant sacrificing the other.
There are, after all, conflicting demands of the body when attempting to win an Olympic gold medal and trying to have a baby. The mindset, however, is the same for both: do all that can be done to make the dream come true.
So, that’s just what Humphries did.
She put off starting a family while living out her Olympic dream as a bobsledder — having won four medals, including three gold, since her 2010 debut in the Games.
At the Olympics, and in family planning, timing is vital. The clock stops for no one – not even an active athlete hoping to carry a child for nine months within a small window of the four-year Olympic cycle.
Humphries then learned prior to the 2022 Beijing Olympics that her path to motherhood would not be quite as smooth as a trip around the bobsled track.
“My body’s always responded sport wise, and because I have this awareness of it and how to make it operate and function physically at its best … I felt pretty confident going in that [getting pregnant] was going to be an easy process or that I had all the tools,” she said on NBC Local’s “My New Favorite Olympian” podcast. “And I did have all the tools, but it definitely wasn’t an easy process.”
During a routine hip MRI in 2021, a cyst was found on one of Humphries’ ovaries that would have to be surgically removed. During the removal, doctors discovered that Humphries had endometriosis. The condition causes uterine tissue to grow outside of the uterus that can turn to scar tissue and potentially fuse to other organs, impacting the ovaries, fallopian tubes and pelvis.
Humphries said because it was a Stage 4 diagnosis, the only way for her to get pregnant would be through in vitro fertilization.
“I would have never imagined that when the time came, when I was ready to have kids,” she wrote in a 2023 essay, “my body would fail me.”
Humphries’ body had rarely failed her. Having grown up in Canada, she is a rare Olympic athlete to have won gold medals for two different countries. She made Team Canada as an alternate break woman at the 2006 Winter Olympics, and made her debut during the 2010 Vancouver Games, winning gold in the two-woman race. She repeated as champion in 2014 and took bronze in 2018.
With dual citizenship, she switched allegiance to Team USA, and in 2022 because the first Olympic champion in monobob.
One of her dreams had come true – but at the expense of another.
“I put off becoming a parent selfishly because I wanted to focus on my career,” she said. “I did one of little at-home tests and it was like, ‘Yeah, your fertility is great. Egg quality is okay.’ … And so, I felt confident pushing it off. Naively, that was not smart.”
Humphries, a California resident, and former Team USA bobsled athlete Travis Armbruster got married in 2019. They had attempted to start a family through a natural pregnancy prior to the 2022 Olympics, planning around Humphries’ four-year Olympic cycle, but were unsuccessful.
“We just assumed it was stress, that the timing was off, ovulation was off, it could have been anything,” Humphries said.
After learning of her diagnosis, the couple decided to start IVF treatments in the summer of 2022 when Humphries was 37 years old.
“Obviously, our story is a little bit unique because she was going through fertility treatments while she was still competing,” Armbruster said. “The way that, of course, in our perfect scenario was once the 2022 Olympics were over, we were going to do an egg retrieval, we were going to do implantations, she was going to be pregnant within a few months, everything was going to be groovy.”
But also expensive. Humphries said the first round of IVF alone cost $15,000, which was half of her yearly stipend for being a national team athlete.
“In order to effectively financially put us in a position to do it, she just had to go out and win a world championship medal,” Armbruster said. “Now mind you, she had just won an Olympic gold medal, you know, but that was last year. This is this year. And in sports, they only care what you did yesterday or today. And so, the whole season was do well enough so we can afford to try to have a baby, which is a really, really weird thing to admit that that’s what we were doing, but at the end of the day, that’s what we were doing.”
And Humphries succeeded, helping to fund one dream through another. At the 2023 World Championships, she took silver in monobob and bronze in two-woman.
Humphries then went through three back-to-back embryo transfers — all of which failed.
“It was hard to go through this and have my body respond every single time in sport and have it not respond going through the IVF process,” she said.
She switched doctors and went through a fourth transfer.
“Sport and IVF process, they mimic each other,” she said. “You’re chasing a dream that you don’t know will ever come true. And it’s this feeling of control and lack of control at the same time. There’s things you can do, but you have no control over the outcome and what will happen because it’s doctors, it’s nurses. For me in sport, it’s other competitors. It’s the track, it’s weather. So, you’re putting all your hope and your entire goal and dream in yourself, in someone else’s hands.”
She was in good hands.
Humphries and her husband welcomed their son, Aulden, in June 2024. She finally had a baby in her arms and a medal around her neck.
“Everything I dreamed of,” she said. “It is amazing and I absolutely love it. It’s not without its challenges, don’t get me wrong, but it has met every expectation by far. And I think some of that is because I am older, because I did live out becoming a three-time Olympic champion before I went into motherhood and that journey. It also added stress and pressure because there was no guarantee it was going to happen because I waited so long. But I think that only has made the process that much easier because I don’t feel like I’m giving anything up from a career side for motherhood. I can fully go into it a hundred percent, and my son is my world now.”
And he’ll now enter the Olympic world at just over a year-and-a-half old, as his 40-year-old mother continues pursuing her other dream of winning a medal at the Milan Cortina Games.
“Trying to get back in shape and be back to an Olympic level, hopefully back to the very best in the world, is kicking my butt real hard,” she said. “And I underestimated that portion of becoming a mom and the toll that birth and being pregnant and the whole process of that, that took a way bigger toll on my system.”
Still, she says she wouldn’t change a thing about being a mother.
“I am forever grateful to have that title,” she said. “Same when it comes to being an Olympic champion. Something I worked very hard for that I’m very proud of in a very different way. So, both are an honor.”
But which is more difficult?
“They’re equally as hard for very different reasons,” she said. “You’re going to have great days, you’re going to have rock bottom days … And I think that that’s just part of life, being a mom, being an Olympian … Being able to be both, being able to live out my dreams of both.”
You can tune into “My New Favorite Olympian” wherever you listen to podcasts, with episodes featuring Glenn and more Olympians.
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