The Sanding Party Philosophy: 2x Olympian Kaysha Love Is Shaping the Future of U.S. Bobsled

Kaysha Love could have dreaded sanding. Everyone told her to.

Here's what sanding actually entails. Each bobsled has eight runners, the steel blades on the bottom of the sled, that need to be hand-sanded, polished, and prepped before every single race weekend. 

There are four runners to a set. One set takes roughly four hours. Do the math, and you're looking at six to ten hours of manual labor every week, hunched over metal with sandpaper, for two race runs that will be over in under a minute.

It is tedious. It is repetitive. It is, by every objective measure, the least glamorous part of being an Olympian.

When Love came in as a rookie, the veterans had a warning ready: sanding is the worst. The process felt endless. Week after week. Race after race. 

Then she met Lauren Gibbs, and heard something completely different.

"Lauren told me sanding was her favorite part. That it could be therapeutic, a team bonding experience, this moment where you're putting in all the blood, sweat, and tears into the equipment that's going to help you win."

Something clicked. Love didn't just adopt that mindset, she built an entire culture around it. She started bringing JBL speakers. Then candy. Then, somewhere along the way, iPads propped up, connected to the speakers, running movies or series while hands kept moving. A good playlist debated and curated with the same seriousness as race prep. Her fiancé occasionally conscripted into sanding extra runners on top of his own. 

What Love understood was that the sanding itself was never going to change. The hours weren't going to get shorter. The runners weren't going to prep themselves. 

But the meaning of those hours? That was entirely up to them. And meaning, it turns out, is contagious. Rookies coming in braced for misery found themselves actually looking forward to it. The thing that could break team morale became the place where team morale was made.

The Work Doesn't Change — You Do

The sanding party is a window into exactly how Kaysha Love operates. She doesn’t wait for conditions to improve before she commits. She writes her own story. 

That instinct traces back to 12 years of gymnastics and the body awareness, resilience, and mental discipline that came with it. When she pivoted to track and field, coaches started telling her she had Olympic potential. When a bobsled coach showed up at Nationals and told her she was in the wrong sport, she thought he was crazy.

"I don't know anything about bobsled, this sounds scary, this is intense."

She went to Lake Placid anyway.

Her first run was, by her own description, an acquired taste. She got to the bottom rattled — and then her coach told her she'd pushed within striking distance of national team members. On her first run.

"My dream of wanting to go to the Olympics was far bigger than anything, any sensation, any fear, any emotion that I was feeling in that moment."

By the third run, she was in love with the sport.

The Recruiter

Love has a gift for seeing potential in people before they see it in themselves. She recruited her college teammate Azaria Hill. Hill was a powerhouse sprinter who, in Love's words, had "unfinished business" as an athlete. 

Then there's her fiancé Hunter Powell, a retired professional decathlete who, after stepping away from track, started training in a way that looked suspiciously familiar to Love.

"With track and field, he was really having to hold himself back of how he wanted to physically train. This is somebody who wants to be in the weight room four or five times a week, who wants to sprint, who wants to go to the depths of every single day."

Retirement hadn't slowed him down. If anything, it had unlocked him. Love recognized the pattern immediately because she'd lived it herself.

"He's the type of person that when he sets his mind to something, he's doing it. And that's the kind of people that simply accelerate and do so well in bobsled."

Love’s Biggest Bet Yet

After the 2022 Olympics, Love sat with a feeling she couldn't shake.

It wasn't just disappointment, though there was that too. She had been one of the best brakemen in the world heading into Beijing and she knew what her team was capable of. Seventh place didn't reflect it.

"We were better than that."

Love looked at the U.S. program and saw a gap that nobody was filling. Veteran pilots had built two of the most decorated careers in U.S. bobsled history. But there were no development pilots building toward readiness behind them.

"Our program had built up a massive legacy, potentially crumbling to the ground when we lose two pilots who have had some of the best careers in bobsled history. At the time, we had no one to pass the torch to. That was a really sickening feeling."

She thought about waiting. Coming back as a brakeman for another quad, starting the piloting transition after 2026 when the timing felt more natural. But the window to learn underneath the coaches who have shaped U.S. bobsled wasn't guaranteed to stay open.

"Who better than me?"

High-level figures in the sport told her plainly that the transition was nearly impossible in the timeframe she was attempting. That becoming a competitive pilot takes four to eight years minimum just to start seeing results on the World Cup tour. That the Olympics were an entirely different conversation.

Love heard them. And kept going.

Piloting, she discovered, was unlike anything else she'd ever learned.

"You can break down the film of what sleds look like in certain curves, but you can't break down when or what or how much pressure the pilots are pulling inside the sled. There could be literally 50 different scenarios of how that sled reached that point in the curve."

The skill had to be felt, over and over, on tracks around the world, under the pressure of World Cup competition, with the Olympics on the horizon. It was, by her own account, the most challenging thing she'd ever done. Managing the frustration of a skill set that resisted the kind of deliberate, analytical approach that had served her throughout her entire athletic life.

"The only limit is yourself. As long as you have the right mentorships, the right circle, the right mentality, and just the potential, anything is possible."

The sanding party logic, applied to the biggest challenge of her career. The work doesn't change. You decide what mentality you take to it. 

ABOUT THIS SERIES

I'm Amy Wotovich and I am on a mission to interview 100% of Team USA's 2026 Olympic and Paralympic athletes to create the most comprehensive mindset record of a single Games cycle. What do elite competitors actually believe about pressure, identity, failure, and joy? Kaysha Love is one of hundreds of athletes sharing their unfiltered answers. Follow the journey!