PARK CITY, Utah — Ashley Caldwell spent her last weekend before she gave birth shoveling 11 truckloads of dirt out of her driveway. It was Caldwell’s version of nesting at 37 weeks pregnant in mid-July.
“‘Ashley, we don’t have to do all of it,’” said her husband, Justin Schoenefeld. “She was like, ‘No, we’re doing it all.’”
Schoenefeld’s protest was light. He already knew little could dissuade Caldwell, 32, from trying difficult things.
At only 13, Caldwell left her parents and two siblings in Virginia for an elite winter sports academy in Lake Placid, New York. She’d flipped and somersaulted around her family’s home growing up, and, as a teen away from home, she trained as an aerialist, practicing gliding down a snowy slope on skis before launching upward and performing tricks. She was a natural. Caldwell became the only woman in history to land a quadruple-twisting triple backflip.
Caldwell, a member of the U.S. Ski and Snowboard national team since 2010, has recovered from two ACL operations and competed at four Olympics, and she won a gold medal in 2022 as part of a team alongside Schoenefeld, whom she met a decade earlier competing on the aerials world circuit. To reach their wedding ceremony in February, the couple backcountry skied 45 minutes up a mountain above Park City as snow fell; the bride wore brilliant-white snow pants and a matching snow jacket, trimmed in gold. They wed in snow boots.
Around the same time, Caldwell learned she was pregnant and began plotting what she considered her hardest feat yet: qualifying for the 2026 Winter Olympics in Italy, less than a year after having given birth and after having missed nearly all of her typical summer training. Learning from others’ examples was not easy.
“There’s not that many people that are that [highly ranked] that have come back after a baby,” she said.
On July 16 — three days after she finished shoveling, two days after having mountain biked and one day after she gingerly squatted nearly 100 pounds in the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Association’s training center near Park City — Caldwell delivered a baby boy named Harvey after 26 hours of labor.
Seven months remained until the Olympics. By the time Caldwell was home from the hospital, she was already considering what it would take to qualify.
“Right away,” she said. “How quickly can I drop weight? How quickly can I get my stomach muscles back? How quickly can I be strong enough and get my ligaments back together?”
The motivation to try
For more than half of her life, Caldwell confidently performed complex tricks six stories high in the air because she knew exactly what to expect from every rotation, flip and landing. Strapped into a harness on a trampoline, aerialists practice a trick’s specific choreography for weeks before they ever test it on skis.
Parenting would be different. Like every first-time parent, Caldwell and Schoenefeld would be launching into the unknown.
The day before her son was born, three weeks early, she pondered how her body would respond. Olympian parents do not receive a guide covering the emotional or financial support they can expect. Caldwell did not know of a group chat for athletes who are masters of their sport but novices as parents.
She wondered whether her sponsors or coaches or the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee would view her as diminished, a concern that was not without precedent. A former professional runner once called getting pregnant the “kiss of death for a female athlete.” In 2019, the Olympic sprinter Allyson Felix wrote that her sponsor, Nike, had proposed paying her 70% less after she gave birth. Outcry led the company to change its maternity policy for Olympic athletes.
For guidance, Caldwell often spoke with Faye Gulini, a U.S. snowboarder and fellow four-time Olympian who lives less than a mile away. Gulini, 33, had given birth to her second child only three weeks before Caldwell, and she was also wrestling with whether to attempt an Olympic comeback in Milan Cortina.
“The very reason I thought I was done snowboarding, having kids and starting a family, was the very reason that I wanted to return,” Gulini said. “It was no longer about me and my journey. It was about us and our journey and what I could teach them and show them and experience with them. And it just gave me so much motivation to try — for them.”
When the Olympics’ opening ceremony begins Feb. 6, several new mothers could be on Team USA, such as Jamie Anderson, one of the most decorated snowboarders in U.S. history and a two-time Olympic gold medalist, who gave birth to her second child in April.
Less than 16 months after Meghan Daniel delivered her son child, a son, she is now trying to qualify for what would be her third Olympics for Team USA in snowboard cross.
When the U.S. snowboarding team hosted a training camp in Argentina in October, Daniel made the trip solo to attempt her first ride on a boardercross course since the fall of 2022 — before she had children — while her family remained another hemisphere away near Park City. The distance was necessary because her husband cannot work remotely internationally, she said. It was Daniel's third two-week trip away from her family for a training camp, and she described feelings of guilt over her time away. But while she was in Argentina preparing for her “nerve-racking” ride, Daniel got a text message from her husband with a video from their 2-year-old daughter.
“She was like, ‘Good luck, Mommy.’ And, oh, my gosh, it gave me the most motivation ever,” Daniel said. “It was the cutest thing. I just feel motivated by them and just completely different than I feel or felt before having kids.”
Caldwell was motivated to start a family nearly two years ago, but said she was sensitive that although her career was well-established, her husband, who at 27 is five years younger, was just entering his prime and did not feel ready. After she learned she was pregnant, she was cautious about publicizing the news out of concern that getting pregnant could create a stigma — how patient would sponsors or coaches be in waiting for her return to the slopes?
As her due date neared, Caldwell began reconsidering, through a parental lens, the choices she and her parents made to enable her career. Would she have let her child leave home at 13 to train? (Maybe not, she said.) Would she still feel the physical risks of her sport were worth it? (Same.)
Training as a high-level athlete is, Caldwell said, “so selfish of an endeavor; everything you do 100% of the time is about performance. And when you have kids, that’s not really feasible as much.”
Yet those choices had also led to a career she hoped would serve as an example to her child to boldly pursue their dream, and competing only seven months postpartum could continue the overarching theme of her career, she believed.
“It’s female empowerment,” she said. “That’s been my thing my entire career, is you can push boundaries of what people expect.”
She was still determining her own boundaries. The difference between owning one gold medal, from 2022, and potentially adding a second was not so large as to motivate her to qualify for Milan Cortina all by itself, she said. Her first priority was giving birth to a healthy son and emerging healthy herself, she said, and yet, she also could not fully turn off her competitive instincts. By July, she had mapped out her breastfeeding schedule for the next six months to coincide with the opening ceremony.
“I’ve been to the last four” Olympics, she said. “If I’m not there at the next one, I’ll be like, what the heck?”
“Come back,” Schoenefeld answered, “when you’re 36.”
‘I just kind of have to find this happy balance’
After Gulini returned from the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, she and her husband decided the time was right to try for children.
By the start of 2023, Gulini was pregnant with a son. She had expected that season to be her last before she retired, but she was ready to shut it down after she learned she was pregnant — until her obstetrician said it was safe to keep competing.
She went on to race so well at several high-profile competitions while she was pregnant that “I kind of started to get this itch” to make it to Milan Cortina in 2026, she said. That urge remained even after she learned that her second child, a daughter, would arrive seven months before the Games.
“But I wanted to make sure that if I did ... that I wasn’t going to do it and create space and distance between me and my kids and my family,” Gulini said. “I was going to do it with them, and very much alongside them. And if that meant sleepless nights before a race, so be it. But I wasn’t going to travel three months on the road and not see them, because that was not the goal.”
She most likely would have stayed retired had she stepped away in 2023 without children, she said, but parenthood reinvigorated her drive, even as it presented new challenges.
“The goal is always the same. It’s always to be the best at the sport: gold medal. But the why is so different, and the how is so different. And I think that’s been the hardest thing for me as an athlete.
“It’s hard to not feel guilt missing things from my athletic career, but then the same goes for my kids; like, if I’m not there for them, I have tons of guilt. So I just kind of have to find this happy balance where I’m giving enough to both, and again, the kids are priority and snowboarding is second.”
Striking that balance was not easy. In October, her schedule took her family to Switzerland and, in November, to a training camp in New Hampshire. Her daughter had fitful nights sleeping. Both children got sick. Occasionally, Gulini had to miss a recovery or gym session.
“You’re just constantly fighting this uphill battle of how do I perform at the top level,” she asked.
Yet this fall, Gulini decided to plunge ahead with plans to qualify. Gulini will learn whether she has a spot on the U.S. Olympic team by late January.
“It’s surprising how well you can do on low sleep and nursing,” she said, a sentiment that echoed a belief Daniel shared — that becoming a mom had made her better. This fall, as their nascent comebacks began, Caldwell and Gulini often sent each other pictures of their workouts in the U.S. Ski & Snowboard gym as their children watched from inside their car seats on the gym’s floor.
Being parents forced them to manage their time more efficiently and led them to view their sport through a broader perspective. A bad day training on the snow was no longer the end-all, be-all.
“You’re too worried about, like, I don’t know, keeping humans alive,” Daniel said.
The cost of qualifying
In early December, Gulini’s training and competitions took her and her family to Italy, Switzerland and Austria. Her husband can work remotely, making traveling as a family manageable, if still difficult. In Europe, he spent mornings with their children before he started work at night, often taking meetings in quiet corners of their hotel.
“And at the end of the day, if I don’t make it to the Olympics, this journey was so worth it,” Gulini said.
That worth is attached to a new valuation. Starting with the 2026 Winter Olympics and continuing through at least the 2032 Summer Olympics, every U.S. Olympian and Paralympian will receive $200,000 in financial benefits, with the amount multiplying for every Olympics in which an athlete competes. Athletes will get $100,000 paid out over four years either when they turn 45 or 20 years after their qualifying Olympics, whichever comes later. And upon athletes’ deaths, their chosen beneficiaries will receive an additional $100,000.
Those figures are well below the minimum salaries offered in the NBA and the NFL, but they are significant sums for most athletes competing in Olympic sports, especially winter sports, in which sponsorship dollars can be scarce. Gulini said she still has a few sponsors, but otherwise, she and her husband were footing the bill for their family’s travel.
To afford to chase their Olympic dreams, an athlete typically “either has a full-time second job or rich parents,” Caldwell said, saying she falls into the former category. She works for a private equity firm that lends to real estate developers.
After Gulini had her son in 2023, she found a grant offered by USOPC to help pay for injury-related costs that insurance would not cover. After her daughter was born in the summer, she heard of a Team USA New Family Fund that USOPC advertised as a one-time grant to help cover costs associated with child care, infant supplies and feeding support. Outside organizations, including the Women’s Sports Foundation, have also at times offered grants for athletes who are also mothers. One offered $10,000 aimed at family expenses; another fund covered some costs of travel and training for women who are Olympic and Paralympic hopefuls.
Still, Daniel said she wished drop-in child care were available at the U.S. Ski & Snowboarding training center, just outside Park City. Gulini wished more key leaders within the organization had children of their own to relate better with the demands of parenting. Several said they approached motherhood unclear about what financial resources, if any, were available to new parents. If one found a grant, the news was shared ad hoc, often by text message.
“Certainly nobody reaches out with a packet of like ‘Here’s what is available to you, congrats on your growing family! If you have questions, reach out to this person,’” Gulini said. “The resources are very not well-known.”
Asked about the support for Olympian parents, USOPC said that before the Paris Olympics it created a five-page guide listing all its offerings, including private lactation spaces within Team USA facilities. USOPC also provided supplies and covered fees for shipping frozen breast milk home from the Games and offered psychological help, in the form of parent support groups. USOPC is finalizing its offerings for the coming Olympics, a spokesman said, but many of the same services are expected to be offered in Milan-Cortina, as well.
The International Olympic Committee said in a statement that all competing Olympians or Paralympians who are attending Milan Cortina with their children will receive a “Little Champions” kit from Pampers, adding that there are no restrictions for breastfeeding at the Games.
But the Olympic Villages at the coming Games do not include any facilities solely dedicated for breastfeeding “due to overall space constraints,” the IOC said. “However, a certain number of bookable spaces will be made available in each Village, which may be used for breastfeeding, among other purposes.”
‘It just didn’t feel right’
How her body would recover from childbirth weighed on Caldwell before Harvey’s birth. Yet by late July, just one week after his arrival, Caldwell felt so good that she told Schoenefeld she felt ready to resume mountain biking on the trails near their home.
His protest — “He was like, ‘That’s ridiculous,’” she recalled — worked this time, for a few days. One week later, she got back on the bike.
It was less about resuming her training and more about proving that “I can be Ashley and be a mom at the same time,” she said in November.
But qualifying for Milan Cortina was not as simple as pulling a bike out of her garage. Making the U.S. aerials team would require traveling to Australia in November, before a month in Finland and two weeks in China. The U.S. men’s and women’s aerials teams travel together, so Schoenefeld would be with her, but for their schedules to work, additional help from their family would need to be enlisted, and for weeks at a time.
Pulling off the choreography of a rotating double backflip still felt feasible to Caldwell. But the logistics of qualifying did not.
“I don’t want to half be an athlete, I don’t want to half be a mom at this point,” she said. “And I think that there’s probably a way to make it work, but for me, it just didn’t feel right.”
She is not retiring from the sport, just no longer attempting an Olympic comeback this winter, she said. Finances, again, played a role. Had more financial support for child care been available, whether through grants or sponsors, the U.S. might have had another medal threat in Milan Cortina.
Caldwell acknowledged she might have made a different decision had she not already enjoyed so much success in her career.
Professional women’s athletes are under “a crazy level of pressure” navigating families and careers, she said, and she was proud that Gulini was going for the Olympics, just as she was ultimately content to end her bid.
“Do I think it would be really cool to go to the Olympics with my kid? For sure,” Caldwell said. “But I don’t know. ... I was ‘OK, I want to be the best in the world at freestyle skiing.’ Now I want to be the best in the world of being a mom. And it’s just a total switch of mindset.”
