Living the Dream He Never Actually Dreamed
Powell to compete at Olympics in bobsled
Mike Brohard
They could see this coming long before they witnessed it happen.
In their collective minds, there were all the pieces, just no outline for the puzzle. But looking back, this all makes sense.
It’s late spring in 2018, the end of Hunter Powell’s junior year at Colorado State. There had been prior stops for college – Western Colorado and Baylor. There had been goals at the start, which always changed, sometimes begrudgingly for Powell.
But in the moment, he approached his CSU multis coach at the time, Ryan Baily, and asked a question: What’s the hardest workout I could do?
Baily, now at Georgia, knew in the moment there was no simple answer, not considering the maniacal approach Powell took to training. Nothing was too tough. Baily wanted to answer the challenge, test just how far his student would go. Come up with something no sane individual would attempt.
“I said, ‘OK, do a 100-yard sled pull with a hundred pounds.’ And then I said, ‘yeah, do it for a hundred reps,’” Baily recalled. “I will call it the century workout.”
On the Fourth of July that year, Baily answered a call from Powell. He told his coach the football staff had just thrown him off the practice field while he was on the 17th rep.
Challenge accepted, and the horror hit Baily.
“I said, ‘Hunter, if you finish this workout, I'm going to cut you from the CSU track and field team because you're going to be hurt. I'm going to cut you,” Baily said. “And I said next year, after you're done and after nationals, you can do whatever you want. I don't care.”
Now it’s the Fourth of July, 2019. Powell has spent the year winning Mountain West championships in the heptathlon (indoors) and the decathlon (outdoors), qualifying for the NCAA Outdoor Championships. In the buildup to the national meet, Powell sustained an ankle injury, one which forced him to pull out of the meet after the first event.
Baily’s phone dings. It is Powell’s mother sending him a video – of her son finishing the century workout on what turned out to be a broken ankle. He completed in 3 hours, 47 minutes.
Who knew that a few years later, Powell would go to a bobsled combine in Utah at the urging of his now-fiancé, Kaysha Love, a former UNLV sprinter whom he became close with at Mountain West meets. And for the first time, something in athletics genuinely felt like it came natural to him.
“It is wild. I remember telling Kaysha several times last year and this year, too, I remember telling her it's bizarre because this is the first time that I've ever come into an athletic venture and I was already good at it from the start,” said Powell, who was named to the US Olympic bobsled team for the upcoming Milano Cortina Games in Italy. “When I was doing decathlon, I was thinking, ‘you're going to be good, but I wasn't good yet.’ When I was doing the 400 or anything, all these things, everything I've ever done is he has a lot of potential, but I never started out good. This is the first time I ever came in and someone was like, ‘you're pretty good.’”
And now Powell is days away from living a dream he never dreamed. Like other kids, the first time he watched the Olympics he told himself that would be him someday. But it was supposed to happen in the summer, on a track. It started with the 400 meters until his first college pushed him toward the decathlon.
So he switched college and was pushed again. He was better at it this time, but his coach left and so did Powell. Back home where Baily helped him gain traction in the multis.
Nothing about his path has been linear, something Powell is very grateful for considering the end result. He’s an Olympian – just Colorado State’s second for the Winter Games, both former track athletes who found themselves in a bobsled.
“I couldn't agree more. Yeah, it's really just one of those, I don't know ... I made a little goofy video a couple years back when I was getting on a track talking about, you know, the work you put in will always bear fruit, but it's rarely the fruit that you expect,” Powell said. “I don't know, those words have been resonating with me lately.
“It's like, man, this is literally the dream I worked 15 years for and I could have never guessed that I was going to be in this sport or that I was going to love it the way I am. It's just surreal. It's a good word. Yeah, it's wild.”
Damn fitting if you ask those who know him best.
They know the Powell who not only worked hard but found creative ways to do so. He’d concoct workouts they would describe as nuts. He called them fun. If you needed a push, he was behind you with both hands. If you needed encouragement, he was your personal hype man.
“I am not surprised. He has been working so hard, I feel like, his entire life,” said Lexie Keller, a former teammate and workout partner after both went pro. “Maybe it wasn't toward bobsled, but I'm not surprised that it paid off towards something, you know?
“I think the beauty of Hunter is that no matter what he is working toward, he's going to put his all into it, whether that's his relationships, his family, his work, sports. So I'm not surprised that it's paid off in different ways.”
It's like, man, this is literally the dream I worked 15 years for and I could have never guessed that I was going to be in this sport or that I was going to love it the way I am. It's just surreal. It's a good word. Yeah, it's wild.Hunter Powell
While Powell was still pushing for the decathlon, he was working as an assistant coach for Colorado State. And when injuries started to mount, he needed another avenue. Baily tried to push him into CrossFit, because his combination of strength and speed would be perfect.
Powell wasn’t feeling it at all. But those talks with Love turned into dates, and eventually wedding plans. She was a 2022 Olympian in Beijing, and in 2025, won medals for monobob and the two-man sled at the World Championships. She suggested bobsled.
“She's telling me I really ought to try this out, I think it'd be really good. You're really strong, so you know, all the BS,” Powell said. “I told her you’re out of your freaking. Not a chance. No way.
“She ended up talking me into it, doing this combine that they had out in Salt Lake to where if you're one of the top three guys in the combine, they would pay for you to go out and do a rookie camp. I think they had something like 150 people total at the combine. I ended up having the top performance and they did pay for me to go out and do a rookie camp out in Lake Placid.”
Four weeks later, he attended push championships and he was named to the national team. Went in thinking he would never be good and came out a national team member.
Better yet, he fell in love with the sport, and he had Love to thank for the nudge.
Now it’s January 19, 2026, and the Olympic team is going to be announced. Powell feels confident he will be named, but one never knows. Then he hears his name. Then he hears Love, reminding him he should listen to her more often.
“She reminds me every freaking day, and double that day, so …” Powell said with a laugh.
Everything she told him was true. His time as a decathlete had made him strong and fast, two very big requirements for the sport. He just had to figure out the nuances of it all.
Working as a four-man team. Pushing in unison. Getting into the sled.
Then there’s the ride. Nothing he had done prior prepared him for that part, going down an icy trek on a mountain in a sled which can reach 100 miles per hour, a comfort level some people will never test in a car, let alone a sled.
“It was the very first time ... Man, I was freaking out. I was like, Holy …,” Powell describes. “My heart rate was probably sitting at 150 beats per minute before we even got in the sled. All I could think is if we crash, it's fine. People are fine when it crashes. OK. We'll be fine. Just freaking hold on. I hope I don't mess this up.
“Yeah. I was freaking out, but it's one of those things where it's like, you know, it's crazy, but you got to do it anyway. It's a lot less scary, but every time you go to a new track or even when you go to tracks where you've been there before but they're rough trips, it’s like, man, I hope today's a good day. Then, anytime you do four men, it's so easy to mess up, obviously, as we did in St. Moritz. It's so easy to mess up.”
This is how the US bobsled team is made up, however. It’s not little kids growing up their whole life practicing the event, they come to it from other means. Powell’s sled is made up of three track athletes – two decathletes and a sprinter – and a former swimmer, and he will be the third man in the sled, entering from the right. The other US sled is four former football players.
Getting there has been a two-year rush for him, emotionally and physically. The first competition this season was at the Olympic facility, where his sled placed seventh, just .03 out of a medal.
The whole team spent time in Austria preparing for the Games, then headed to Italy. So much about his journey still feels unreal to him.
In hindsight, Baily sees the puzzle pieces for what they actually were meant to create.
“I’m not surprised at all. No, it surprises me only because his whole life has been set up to be good at this,” Baily said. “Strong upper body and he could sprint. He struggled in the jumps, but you don't need that in bobsled. And because he was so strong upper body, everything he's done in his career has kind of set the path for this adventure in bobsled. And so when he got out there, he says he was just immediately good at it.
“No, it wasn't. That was years of training. There's a lot of good decathletes that go out and find greatness in bobsled. There's a lot of good sprinters that go out and find greatness in bobsled, so it's actually a pretty common path. But for him, he just never felt like he was as talented as other people.”
Keller, now training in North Carolina for the indoor season, has followed this journey with curiosity and hope for her friend. When he called to tell her he was going to try the bobsled, it didn’t faze her a bit.
She saw the pieces in a new light, too. The athleticism, the passion and the urging of Love.
“I actually wasn't too surprised. I knew that his girlfriend did it,” Keller said. “And I wasn't too surprised when I got that call because I feel like Hunter is kind of built for that sport. He's very strong, he's very fast, and he just likes to work hard and just go hard. I feel like that's a sport where you really just have to go all in. So no, I wasn't too surprised.”
The official word was one step. Walking in the Opening Ceremonies is where Powell feels it will really hit him that his Olympic dream came true. The reality of walking out and representing his country.
Forget the fact it will be in Italy as a member of the bobsled team. Competition begins for the men Feb. 16, with the two-man competition, teams which have yet to be named. The final heats of the four-man sleds are on Feb. 22.
“It's not the one I expected. It did not happen when or how I thought,” Powell said. “It wasn't my Plan A, it wasn't my Plan B, it wasn't my Plan C, but it really was the dream, man. And it happened in the way that I would have least expected.”
The dream of a lifetime born out of once in a century.
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