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She spent her high school and collegiate careers chasing her Olympic dreams on the track. 12 days after her 2025 season ended, she was chasing that dream on ice.
Jadin O’Brien, one of the most decorated athletes in the history of the Notre Dame track and field program, built her résumé as a pentathlon and heptathlon specialist, earning multiple NCAA titles, 10 All-American Honors, five First-Team All-ACC honors and two Olympic Trials Qualifiers in 2021 and 2024.
O’Brien’s story in college is defined and driven by her performance despite the odds stacked against her, and it began when she was only five years old. O’Brien was diagnosed with Pediatric Autoimmune Neuropsychiatric Disorders Associated with Streptococcal Infections (PANDAS), which means she experienced a severe onset case of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and had noticeable changes in mood, behavior and motor function. According to O’Brien, this made her become “extremely competitive,” and she is “extremely proud” of her younger self, especially because she is “able to accomplish [her] lifelong dream.” Despite these odds, her childhood with a father who played professional football “inspired her Olympic dreams.” Hearing his stories drove O’Brien to achieve the highest level of athletics she could, but in her own way. Up until this point, however, she believed it would be for track, and although for now it’s bobsled… track and field will always be the ultimate goal.
Many outsiders may see the shift to bobsledding as abrupt or random, but it has been on the back of O’Brien’s mind for some time. After a video on O’Brien’s Instagram page of her deadlifting 335 pounds, power-cleaning 201 pounds and bench pressing 270 pounds, Elana Meyers Taylor reached out and asked if O’Brien would be interested in trying out for bobsled. Taylor, a former softball player at George Washington University who accidentally found her way into bobsledding, has been a top talent recruiter for Team USA since she knew what to look for in athletes who have the potential to transfer into the sport. At first, O’Brien admits that she didn’t think too much of it, until this past indoor season when the call came again, and it was finally a route O’Brien was ready to travel.
Burned out from the physical and mental grind of college track, O’Brien knew she couldn’t miss her first chance at the Olympics. After just two days off, O’Brien trained for 10 days straight before traveling to Lake Placid, New York, for rookie camp, then tried out and made the World Cup team, where she represented the United States on the European circuit. Training in these conditions would cause anyone anxiety; however, O’Brien believes “the harder you think about certain things, or fixate on them, you start overthinking, and that’s a big problem when it comes to sports.” This mindset allows her to block out the doubt and perform at the highest level.
O’Brien’s seven events, endurance tests, were quickly transformed into one explosive push.
“Everything you don’t do in track, you do in bobsled,” O’Brien said.
She called them “polar-opposites,” specifically comparing her long, indoor track workouts to her short, explosive work on cement and ice. However, the track to the bobsled pipeline is strong, especially with sprinters and jumpers, since you need to be fast, powerful and able to handle the physical aspects of the bobsled. As O’Brien said, it's “not a smooth ride, and you can get beat up.”
To highlight how bobsled is more than just fast-pushing, Canadian bobsledder Mike Evelyn told Sports Illustrated how it’s a “mental state of [being] a racehorse” and you “need to stay calm because you’re trying to do the most ballistic, violent running anyone’s ever done.” O’Brien felt this violence first-hand one day in January 2025 during a practice run. Taylor hadn’t adjusted the sled for the tough curve ahead, which caused the sled to lose balance and slam into the walls of the track twice, even taking out chunks of ice on the way. O’Brien was ejected from the sled and flipped in the air, causing her to land on her back and slide down the ice, but she was quick to realize she couldn’t feel anything. After a few minutes, O’Brien’s movement came back, and when assessed through an X-ray for broken bones, nothing was obviously broken. O’Brien knew this would be her last chance to prove herself for Olympic selection, so she battled alongside Taylor during the race, despite being in excruciating pain.
Behind O’Brien’s Olympic aspirations was a community that indirectly gave her the confidence to step onto the ice. At Notre Dame, O’Brien had more than medals and record-breaking performances, but a family that truly believed in her.
“My coaches, teammates, professors and even the athletic facility as a whole created a magical experience,” O’Brien said.
Most importantly, she credits the Irish athletic department with showing her “what she’s capable of and how strong she is mentally and physically.”
O’Brien’s Olympic competition began on Friday, Feb. 20, where she was the pusher for Taylor in heat one of the 2-Woman Bobsleigh. Taylor was riding high on winning a gold medal in the Women’s Monobob a few days prior, and fans had high hopes for the two. The way Olympic bobsled timings work is that there are two heats each day of competition, with their final times being the total of the four, so heat four (being the final race) could determine medal standing. After their heat one race, the pair fell to fifth place, finishing in 57.14, 0.22 seconds behind the Team USA pair of Kaillie Armbruster Humphries and Jasmine Jones, who took first place in this heat.
After heat two, Taylor and O’Brien finished in 12th place, with a total time of 1:55.13, meaning they finished their race in 57.99, which was a total of 1:20 behind the German pair Laura Nolte and Deborah Levi, who came in first, racing a total of 1:53.93.
After heat three, Taylor and O’Brien finished in sixth place with a total time of 2:52.7, meaning their time was 57.57, putting them 1:54 behind the same German pair of Nolte and Levi. In their final race of the 2026 Olympics, Taylor and O’Brien finished in seventh place with a final time of 57.79 seconds, making their total time 3:50.49. The German pair Nolte and Levi took first, another German pair of Lisa Buckwitz and Neele Schuten took second and the Team USA pair, Humphries and Jones, took third.
Although not what she had envisioned growing up, O’Brien was grateful to compete on the Olympic stage. But that childhood dream to compete on the track is still alive, and the 2028 Summer Olympics just so happen to be in her home country.