Meghan Duggan competes at the Olympic Winter Games PyeongChang 2018 on Feb. 19, 2018 in PyeongChang, South Korea.
Like the Olympic Winter Games, Feb. 29 only comes around every four years. What more appropriate birthday could there be for the child of two Olympic gold medalist ice hockey players?
Team USA’s Meghan Duggan gave birth to her “lucky leap year baby” George Robert Apps-Duggan on Feb. 29.
“Welcome to the world, little man,” Duggan wrote on Instagram. “… There is not enough room in the world for all of the love that we feel for him.”
Weighing in at 8 pounds, 1 ounce and measuring 20.5 inches, George should inherit some goal-scoring genes from his star forward parents. Duggan and Canada’s Gillian Apps were married in 2018, and have four Olympic gold medals between them. Duggan has one — in addition to two earlier silver medals — from the Olympic Winter Games PyeongChang 2018. Apps won hers in 2006, 2010 and 2014 — the latter two coming at the expense of Duggan and Team USA.
Apps retired from hockey in 2015. Duggan, 32, has obviously been sidelined while pregnant, but has expressed interest in returning to Team USA sometime in 2020. She has followed the training regimen employed by fellow Americans and new moms Jocelyne Lamoureux-Davidson and Monique Lamoureux-Morando in their return to the ice.
Assuming their son follows in his parents’ footsteps onto the ice, Apps and Duggan will one day have a decision to make: which country will he represent?
“It’ll be a heated debate,” Duggan told NBC Sports in October. “We’ll cross that bridge when we get there.”
Todd Kortemeier is a sportswriter, editor and children’s book author from Minneapolis. He is a contributor to TeamUSA.org on behalf of Red Line Editorial, Inc.
