Inside the Data Collaboration That Helped Team USA Win Olympic Gold

Snowflake Summit 26 has come and gone. But I can still hear the animated conversations spilling out of Moscone Center onto the sidewalks of San Francisco: Thousands of people from around the world sharing what’s possible with data and AI.

One of my personal highlights was sitting down with Team USA Bobsled/Skeleton (USABS), including U.S. Olympic gold champion Elana Meyers Taylor, USA Bobsled Head Coach Chris Fogt, USABS CEO Aron McGuire and Director of Sport Performance Curt Tomasevicz.

As the Official Data Collaboration Provider for Team USA and the Official Data Cloud Provider for USA Bobsled/Skeleton, Snowflake supports this team in the data behind every split-second decision. 

Like when Elana Meyers Taylor won her first U.S. Olympic gold medal at age 41 by 4/100ths of a second. Nearly four miles of ice, the difference between gold and silver was a sliver of time shorter than a heartbeat.

Margins that small don't happen by accident. They're built by athletes and coaches pushing what’s physically possible with the most powerful new tools available to them: data and AI.

The race begins before the bobsled moves

In bobsled, the push start is everything. Athletes push a 400- to 500-pound sled to top speed before loading. If a single athlete takes one step too many, the physics turns against them, and the last step creates drag that compounds all the way to the finish line.

For years, teams relied on feel. But in bobsled, data collaboration is the group sport behind the group sport. At Milano Cortina 2026, USABS could collaborate with next-generation data thanks to Snowflake CoWork — and they acted on it. 

“If you push the sled one step too far, you get in the sled and you’re actually pulling back, creating a braking force which kills your run,” says Aron McGuire, CEO of USABS. “If you get in a little too early, you’re not maximizing the team’s ability to push. Working with Snowflake CoWork, we were able to calculate the exact number of steps athletes should take prior to getting in the sled.”

At the top of the track, that kind of precision makes all the difference. But it starts long before race day.

Not all bobsled curves are what they seem 

Sixteen curves. Four runs. In a sport where margins are measured in hundredths, where mental energy matters just as much as physical, knowing which ones count can make all the difference.

Just ask Elana Meyers Taylor, five-time U.S. Olympian, mother, disability advocate and the most decorated bobsledder in American history. The data told a different story than what her eye could see, and she shifted how she raced.

“There were certain curves we were focused on because visually they seemed like they were going to be the key to winning or losing the race,” says Meyers Taylor. “But once we ran the data with Snowflake CoWork, we realized there were certain curves you didn't need to focus on at all. The ones that mattered happened to be curves 1, 2 and 4. We just focused on those and knew if we hit those curves, we were going to have a really good race.”

Knowing where to direct energy and where not to is a competitive advantage in any arena. But Meyers Taylor’s record-breaking gold medal at Milano Cortina 2026 demonstrates when and how cutting-edge data can unlock new feats of human performance.

When a bobsledder’s instinct meets its match

Meyers Taylor won gold by trusting both her gut and the data at the same time. Even in monobob, a solo event, the preparation was a team effort: coaches and athletes working from the same data before Elana ever stepped onto the ice.

“Once you’re going down the track, you rely only on your instinct because that’s all you have,” she says. “But how you combine the two is: you take the data off the ice, you analyze it, and then you get in the sled and do your best.”

The same is true for the coaches guiding them. 

“We have our head pilot coach who has been doing this sport since 1986, and we just started getting this data in the last two years,” says Chris Fogt, Head Coach of USABS. “He's been teaching the same curve the exact same way for a long time. Now we have the data, and we've found a couple of times he wasn't necessarily wrong, but maybe he was off by just a hair. And he was willing to understand it. Combining a coach's experience with data and Snowflake CoWork makes his expertise very, very powerful.”

That, to Fogt, is what good data does. Instead of erasing decades of hard-won expertise, powerful intelligence confirms it, then refines it by just a hair. For USABS, that’s what the partnership with Snowflake is built for: getting coaches and athletes on the same page. As Tomasevicz puts it, “If an athlete can proactively learn something and tell the coach, the coaches are open to learning, too. More ears and eyes.”

Their victories at Milano Cortina 2026 are not a story about technology replacing human judgment. They're a story about what happens when the best in the world stay curious and use data to get even better on and off the track. 

The road home — with a stop in LA

Elana’s gold-medal win for Team USA was the culmination of many lifetimes of hard work. But what comes next is also the reward: the return to the gym, the ice and the next four years of work. Building toward the next Winter Olympic Games cycle, the team is already mapping an even more ambitious data roadmap. 

Recruiting is their next frontier. Unlike other Olympic sports where training often starts in childhood, bobsled recruits from sports ranging from soccer to weight lifting. In fact, Head Coach Chris Fogt and USABS CEO Aron McGuire both came from the world of track and field, while Director of Sport Performance Curt Tomasevicz played college football in Nebraska and gold champion Elana Meyers Taylor pivoted to bobsled after not making the Olympic softball team in 2008. Relying on raw strength, explosive speed and physical stature, bobsled recruits the best athletes from similarly demanding sports. But today, identifying talent is largely manual, with coaches sifting through track-and-field results and football records, and doing cold outreach on social media. 

“Data is the future of our targeted recruiting efforts,” says Tomasevicz. “With Snowflake CoWork, we can be very specific with who we're looking at and give those athletes a very unique second opportunity in life.”

Data collaboration extends beyond recruiting to the ice itself. “Looking at the right combination of power athletes versus speed athletes will help us optimize the start,” says McGuire. “We can create a profile of each athlete’s tendencies: Are they more powerful or faster?” Snowflake helps USABS answer these questions before the sled ever moves.

The team’s ambitions also go beyond recruiting. “Hopefully moving forward, we’ll be able to use AI, put in data on ice conditions, humidity and all these variables, and it'll spit out: ‘Based on these trends, this is the equipment you should use,’” says Meyers Taylor. “It'll take the guesswork out of the equation so we'll be able to go into races more confidently.”

The insights from USABS in Milano Cortina 2026 don't disappear when the flame goes out. They compound across every run and race, every early morning lift, every Games cycle. That's the work we at Snowflake are honored to be part of.

For USABS, the road ahead runs through the Alps in 2030 and home to Salt Lake City in 2034. 

But the data collaboration journey continues in Los Angeles in two years’ time. As the Official Data Collaboration Provider for Team USA and the LA28 Olympic and Paralympic Games, we cannot wait to see what the world's best athletes and data can do together on our home turf. 

Until then, see you in LA.