At the Olympics, motherhood skis away with a gold and a bronze

And Norway’s Bjoergen, 37, won bronze to become the most decorated winter athlete, with 14 Olympic medals, including four in Pyeongchang (a gold, a silver and two bronze).

Both women are also relatively new mothers. Randall’s son, Breck, will be 2 in April. She is the only mother on Team USA, which has 20 fathers. Bjoergen’s son, Marius, turned 2 in December.

Motherhood presents a challenge for any woman trying to juggle work and family, but it is an intense physical and logistical challenge for elite cross-country skiers — several hours a day of grueling training, extra sleep requirements and a brutal travel schedule across six or seven European countries from November through April.

Women’s cross-country skiing experienced something of a baby boom about two years ago. Seven elite ski racers on the World Cup circuit, including Bjoergen and Randall, have toddlers now — and all had babies within about six months of each other in late 2015 and in 2016.

It’s not a coincidence that the top women in the sport gave birth in the same window. With world championships in odd-numbered years and an Olympics every fourth even-numbered year, 2016 was essentially a gap year in cross-country racing — a year without either international event. Which made it a good time to start a family.

After their pregnancies, Randall and her fellow competitors shared parenting advice about sleep training and getting back into shape. It seems to have worked. Two of the women ended up on top of an Olympic podium at these Games and two more came close.

They also worked together to persuade the International Ski Federation to support them. Randall and Finland’s Aino-Kaisa Saarinen were able to get federation officials to provide credentials for caregivers and to find space for baby rooms — stocked with diapers and toys — that doubled as a warm place for children and the people watching over them during long events.

“Men can have families, and they don’t ever have to miss a single race,” said Randall, who has pink highlights in her blond hair and is as ripped as a Ninja warrior. “Knowing we were all having babies, we lobbied to have some support for moms that first season back. It’s the first time the international federation has provided that kind of support.”

While those changes helped, all of the other mothers lived in Europe and didn’t face the same challenges Randall did in packing up her family and traveling for six months out of the year.

For Randall, the only way to make the ski season successful as both an athlete and a parent was to enlist the support of her teammates.

Their buy-in was never in doubt. Randall has long been at the elite level of cross-country skiing, and several of her teammates idolized her when they were teenagers. The goal was for Randall to spend time training with the team and still be there for her family. It helped that her husband, Jeff Ellis, a former Canadian ski racer, worked as a media coordinator for the International Ski Federation. Both sets of grandparents have also provided extensive caregiving during the racing season.

“We made this deal where I wanted to be as much a part of the team as I could, but I didn’t want to be disruptive to the athletes,” Randall said. “Kids bring extra germs, and he might be crying at night.”

After talking with the coaches, her family adopted ground rules — sitting at separate tables in the dining hall to allow the athletes to decide how much or how little they wanted to interact with the baby. Randall and her family stayed in separate quarters, but sometimes those rooms were still within earshot of teammates, creating extra worry about whether a crying baby might wake someone up.

There were bumps in the road. It took a month for Breck to adjust to the time difference in Europe, resulting in multiple wake-ups at night. And it was also a challenge to be on the road with a growing baby. “There was a lot of gear,” Randall said.

The toughest part was dividing her time between the needs of her family and her own desire to be with her team. “How do I be the best mom and best athlete? That part I hadn’t anticipated,” she said.

Diggins said the cross-country team knew that having a baby along during training and competition wouldn’t always be ideal. Sometimes the Americans stayed in small hotels with thin walls, and team members would hear Breck crying in the middle of the night or when they were trying to nap, she said, speaking in fall at an event in Park City, Utah.

But Diggins said the team didn’t want Randall to have to choose between being a mother and being a world-class skier, and they wanted to help her create something approaching a work-life balance. “Women shouldn’t have to choose,” Diggins said. “This team only works when everyone buys in.”

And there were benefits to having Breck along for the ride, said Sadie Bjornsen, another team member. Bjornsen, a self-described “sucker for kids,” said playing with Breck on the road helped keep her from thinking about skiing every waking hour.

“Sometimes I will come in after a race and be bummed out about how I’ve done, and I’ll just go over and hug Breck, and it will make me feel better,” she said.

Randall, who plans to retire after this Olympics, recently won election to the International Olympic Committee Athletes’ Commission. She hopes she can use her experience as a mother and an athlete to help other Olympic families.

In the end, she did not bring her son to the Olympics because the cost was so prohibitive. Instead, Breck stayed in Toronto with her husband’s parents and the separation was painful, said Randall, who said she wanted to work with the IOC to create affordable housing for family members at future Olympics.

She hopes that seeing women like herself and Bjoergen on the Olympic podium will convince a new generation of athletes that it doesn’t have to choose between an Olympic medal and motherhood. In fact, she asserted, the two can work well together. She recalled sharing a moment with Bjoergen when they were each presented a stuffed white Soohorang tiger, the Olympic mascot, during the podium ceremony. They looked at each other with a knowing laugh.

“I said, ‘Well, this is for Breck,’ and she said, ‘This is for Marius.'”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.