The New York Athletic Club is one of the most storied institutions in the history of American sports, and its athletes have won 321 Olympic medals, dating back to the first modern Games in 1896. But for its entire 158-year history, the NYAC had never supported a winter sport athlete.
That’s changing this autumn. Lauren Brzozowski, a bobsledder from northern New Jersey, has signed on as the first NYAC athlete in a Winter Olympic sport. The expansion comes amid record demand for club membership and renewed domestic enthusiasm for Olympic sports, with the U.S. set to host the 2028 Summer Games in Los Angeles and the 2034 Winter Games in Utah.
Jim Herschlein, the captain in charge of sports at the NYAC, said the decision to sign Brzozowski is the result of a confluence of factors. Primarily, sufficient membership revenues, thanks to a post-pandemic boom in New York social clubs, allow the club to budget for new sports without redistributing funding away from existing sports, such as track and field and swimming.
The current members support the sport expansion. And Brzozowski happened to be in the right place at the right time. She reached out reached out to the NYAC this spring, simply looking for a training facility to do workouts, Herschlein said, just as he and his peers were hammering out the inaugural winter sports budget.
“We are in a good position. We’ve got a strong membership base,” Herschlein told Sportico. “We’ve decided, let’s see if we can continue to advance sports—all sports, as the [NYAC] purpose says—and we’re in a position right now to be able to do so.”
Brzozowski, 29, said that the magnitude of becoming the club’s first winter sport athlete is “something I probably think about like 10 times a day, and it makes me super emotional.”
A former college track sprinter, Brzozowski switched to bobsled during the pandemic, and she just missed qualifying for the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan-Cortina. She has goals to represent the U.S. at the 2030 Games in the French Alps and in Utah four years later. Financial and institutional support from the NYAC will be crucial for her preparations, she said, particularly given the steep costs that bobsledders face to compete. Brzozowski estimated she must raise $100,000 for this season alone, to cover fees to rent her bobsleds, vans to transport them, and housing and flights for each competition.
Growing up in northern New Jersey, Brzozowski had friends who were NYAC members, leading her to ask the club about potentially using its workout facilities when she isn’t training at the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Training Center in Lake Placid, N.Y. After some conversation earlier this spring, Brzozowski said Herschlein invited her to a Zoom call one Friday. When she logged on, she was surprised to see him flanked by a handful of other NYAC executive members.
“He [asked], ‘How do you feel about being the first winter athlete?’ And I was like, ‘Oh, my God.’ I was in shock,” she said. “Utter shock.”
The NYAC was founded in Manhattan in 1868, a pioneer of the amateur athletic club movement which would become the basis of the modern Olympic Games. The club’s athletes have won medals at every Summer Olympics, save two—Moscow 1980, which the U.S. boycotted, and Sydney 2000—culminating with 36 at the 2024 Paris Olympics and Paralympics.
NYAC has not always been a font for female athletic empowerment, having only admitted women in the last 37 years. In 1987, the New York Humans Rights Commission charged the club with discrimination over its exclusionary membership policies, following similar actions taken against other prestigious clubs like Union League, University and Century Association. Two years later, in 1989, NYAC leadership formally adopted a rule change that ended its male-only legacy.
Still, the invitation-only club remains one of the more exclusive conclaves in New York City, with dues-paying club-goers supporting NYAC’s 400 elite athletes across 11 Olympic sports.
Ed Napolitano, the club’s director of finance and operations, told Sportico how NYAC recently achieved a milestone: For the first time in four decades, there is a wait list for prospective new members. Of the club’s roughly 10,500 members, Napolitano said, 4,000 have joined in the past five years.
NYAC generated $83.7 million of revenue in fiscal 2025, set against $73.6 million in expenses, according to the club’s most recently filed tax return. Membership dues accounted for $28.4 million of revenue in FY25.
Herschlein would not disclose the amount of funding afforded to the new winter sports budget, in part because each sport’s budget varies from year to year depending on a range of factors, including whether or not it is an Olympic year. But in addition to signing Brzozowski, Herschlein said that NYAC is looking to add between six and 10 new winter athletes in the next year.
“Bobsled, skeleton and luge are probably the first focus, in part because those folks, most of them train in Lake Placid,” he said. “Which is not in Manhattan, but you know, it’s New York.”