Lauren Gibbs and Kaillie Humphries (center) celebrate their win at the first Lake Placid bobsled world cup of the season on Dec. 7, 2019 in Lake Placid, N.Y.
Kaillie Humphries joined Team USA less than two months ago, but already the two-time Olympic champion has a pair of world cup gold medals.
Humphries, a three-time Olympic medalist with Canada before being granted her release at the end of September, competed for the first time since the Olympic Winter Games PyeongChang 2018 last month in North American Cup races in Lake Placid, New York. After making her first U.S. national team with a gold and silver medal there, she and brakewoman Lauren Gibbs slid to gold last weekend to start the 2019-20 world cup season, and then did it again on Saturday.
Still in Lake Placid, Humphries and 2018 Olympic silver medalist Gibbs recorded a time of 56.50 seconds in the first heat, .13 ahead of German duo Kim Kalicki and Erline Nolte in second place.
They came back for heat No. 2 prepared to do it again, and ended up increasing their lead with a time of 57.53 seconds for a total of 1:54.03, .15 ahead of Kalicki and Nolte who held on for second. The Canadian duo of Christine de Bruin and Kristen Bujnowski, who won bronze at the world championships last season, was third.
"It's always great to start the season off with double wins on your home track," said Humphries, who learned to drive in Lake Placid, in a USA Bobsled & Skeleton release. "I definitely made some mistakes and I'm trying not to eat myself up over those. You want to continue getting better, but it's hard. I'm still knocking some of the rust off."
The second U.S. sled of Brittany Reinbolt and Sylvia Hoffman, a finalist in Season 2 of “Milk Life presents, The Next Olympic Hopeful,” finished eighth.
Not only had Humphries, who married American Travis Armbruster earlier this year, not raced on the world cup since before PyeongChang, but it had also been four years since she won back-to-back world cup races.
After a four-man race Sunday, the world cup resumes Jan. 3 in Winterberg, Germany. Humphries leads the world cup standings with 450 points, followed by Kalicki with 410.
Three-time Olympic medalist Elana Meyers Taylor, a perennial podium contender for the U.S., is not competing this season as she prepares to welcome her first child.
Karen Price is a reporter from Pittsburgh who has covered Olympic and Paralympic sports for various publications. She is a freelance contributor to TeamUSA.org on behalf of Red Line Editorial, Inc.
