Canadian Olympic silver medalist Kaillie Humphries made history Saturday when she took the helm of her bobsled in Lake Placid. She and her female teammates were racing against men, and were the first bobsled team to do so.
"To be the first one is cool but at the end of the day I'm not doing it to be the first one," Humphries told the Associated Press. "I'm doing it because it challenges myself to be a better pilot, to have something else to look forward to, something fun."
While Humphries and her team trailed the leader by 2.51 seconds, finishing last, their combined weight measured roughly 300 pounds less than other sleds.
Humphries and Elana Meyers-Taylor piloted male bobsled crews on the World Cup circuit last season. There is no separate four-woman World Cup race.
"The whole point of me competing with the guys in the first place was to show that girls can do four-man," Humphries said, according to CBC News. "We're just kind of taking it one step further and having a full women's crew now.
"We've always wanted to have our own four-woman event. Hopefully in doing this for this second half, the world will see, the other girls will see, the FIBT will see and Bobsleigh Canada will see that we can do this."
The International Bobsleigh and Skeleton Federation announced in September 2014 that four-person races would be officially gender-neutral.
Bobsleigh Canada Skeleton announced in November that only one four-man sled would race in the first three World Cup races of the season. Humphries was furious and lobbied the Canadian bobsleigh governing organization to allow her and other women to form another sled. The BCS's standards, however, require that each sled be filled by unique brakemen. Canada did not have enough brakemen to fill two sleds, let alone three.
BCS president Sarah Storey defended her organization's initial decision to send a sled to the World Cup without Humphries. "It's an outrageous accusation that we're standing in her way because she's a woman," Storey said, according to The National Post. "Canada has pioneered in women's bobsleigh since well before there was any chance of it becoming Olympic."
Humphries went on to lobby the organization to fill the remaining spots with women. They gave her the green-light two weeks ago, tested the athletes, and cleared them to compete.
