Former GW softball player and current Olympian Elana Meyers won a bronze medal Wednesday night in the women’s two-person bobsled, the first bobsledding medal for the United States in the games so far.

“I was just trying to stay calm and relaxed,” Meyers told reporters Wednesday. “We’ve been going at this to have fun this whole time, and that’s really what I was trying to do. I had the hugest grin on my face going down because I knew we were about to do something special.”

Meyers, a 2006 GW alumna who played on the Colonials’ first-ever softball team in 2003, joined the U.S. bobsled team in 2007 after playing one season of professional softball for the Mid-Michigan Ice.

Wednesday night was the culmination of a year’s worth of work for Meyers, who took the year off from her graduate studies at GW to train for the Olympics full time. The training paid off for Meyers, whose team sat in second place after each of the first three runs but fell to third on her fourth and final run.

Meyers was confident coming into the Olympics this year. In an interview during the week before the Olympics, Meyers cited her team’s fast start time and experience on the Vancouver track as factors she thought would bode well for her medal chances at the games.

Number Crunch: 5

The number of seconds remaining
in overtime of Wednesday’s women’s lacrosse game when sophomore Hilary Quinn scored the game-winning goal. GW beat American 12-11.