Kaysha Love, the current Team USA monobob world champion, recently secured her title by winning the second Monobob race of the 2025/2026 IBSF World Cup season, held in Innsbruck, Austria (AUT).
Before becoming a bobsled champion, the 28-year-old native of Utah 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.
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Kaysha Love grew up in a very athletic family where playing college-level basketball or volleyball and watching the Olympics was a long-standing tradition. However, during her senior year at the national track competition, a bobsled coach approached her, suggesting she was competing in the wrong sport.
“I remember just thinking that he was crazy,” Love told Essence. “I had been doing track for the last eight years.”
The coach insisted that everything Love learned in track would transfer to bobsled. Love’s only exposure to the sport was the movie Cool Runnings, and she told him that was all she knew. He responded that this made her perfect, as the movie proved she belonged and that track athletes make excellent bobsledders.
A rookie camp in Lake Placid sparked her ambition.
She recounted, “I went up there and absolutely just fell in love with the idea that I could become an Olympian.”
Within about a year of that experience, she achieved her goal.
Love went from her first bobsled push to competing in the 2022 Beijing Olympics as a push athlete in just 12 months, with only seven bobsled races to her credit.
She remarked, “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.”
Love decided to become a pilot, transitioning from her role as a brakeman. The pilot is responsible for steering the sled and making the split-second choices that determine success or a crash. Her coaches advised her that achieving consistently high-level results in this new role would likely take between four and eight years.
“I won my first World Cup race my first year as a pilot. And then, two years later, I became a world champion.”
Love added, “When you’re a pilot, you are the leader on the team,” Love said. “One fraction of a decision can be the difference between a crash or winning.”
She attributes her approach to her faith and reliance on her teammates, stating, “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.”
Love highlights the strong, team-driven nature of bobsled, contrasting it with “independent team sports” like gymnastics or track. She admits this unexpected and powerful team dynamic is something she has grown to “absolutely love.”
The 28-year-old recently entered a partnership with Native deodorant.
Love stressed that good personal hygiene is vital, especially in close proximity, stating, “When you’re sitting not even an inch away from your teammate, just the importance of smelling good is so real.” This highlights the relevance of her partnership, launched with a commercial during the team’s Latvia competition, which Love noted “the entire bobsled community was just so ecstatic about.”
Love is the official face of the 2026 SKIMS x Team USA collection, an Olympic fashion capsule that has garnered significant anticipation, as reported by Hypebae.
As she prepares for the 2026 Winter Olympics, Love is thinking about legacy as well as the Black women who made space for her in this sport—Elana Meyers Taylor, Lauren Gibbs, and 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 told Essence. “And to look at the impact that they had on U.S.A. bobsled and Team U.S.A. and the Winter Olympics as a whole, it gives me goosebumps.”
She continued, “When people talk about Kaysha Love, I want them to look at me in that same light. 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.”
Her advice to the Black women who are chasing goals that feel unconventional is, “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.”
Kaysha Love advises aspiring athletes not to let rigid timelines discourage them from pursuing their goals. She hopes her career will serve as an inspiration.
She said, “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.’”
