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The gold medalist opens up about motherhood and her heartbreaking journey to the joy she has now

Tara Lipinski has now added “Mom” to her list of accomplishments.

The Olympic gold medal winner, 41, known for skating into history at the 1998 Olympics, reveals to PEOPLE that she and husband Todd Kapostasy, 40, recently welcomed daughter Georgie, born via surrogate.

“I dreamt about this for so long,” she says on a sunny afternoon in her living room, while Georgie naps nearby. She’s excited about everything mothering a newborn has to offer. “A crying baby, sleepless nights. Even when I’m like, ‘Okay, take an hour nap,’ I’m almost too excited. I’m like, ‘She’s there. Just watch her a little longer.”

Lipinski adds “it’s the best tired I’ve ever been.” She and Kapostasy, a producer and director, whom she wed in 2017, can’t help but take stock in their current bliss, something they feared might never come.

Georgie, whom Lipinski says is “so calm and peaceful,” arrived following a five-year struggle with infertility that included multiple painful miscarriages. It all left Lipinski feeling broken and alone until she and Kapostasy launched their vulnerable new podcastUnexpecting in August. “I felt so unseen, so unheard for so long. I was tired of not sharing,” she says.

The athlete, who is a sportscaster for NBC alongside Johnny Weir, says infertility taught her a hard lesson. “It made me realize that sometimes life is just not fair,” she says. “For so long I thought, ‘Oh, you get a win, you get a loss, everything evens out.’ As a skater I was able to train harder, force it. But when it came to infertility, there’s things you can’t change.”

After years of trying for a successful pregnancy Lipinski, who suffers from endometriosis, and Kapostasy learned there was a reproductive immunology issue where her body would reject their fertilized embryo. “I went through four pregnancies, four miscarriages, four D&Cs [dilation and curettage, an often painful procedure to remove pregnancy tissue from the uterine lining],” she says.

After her last miscarriage, “It was like, ‘Okay Tara, you’ve put your body through enough.’ That’s when I decided to think of other options.”

She formed an instant connection with her surrogate Mikayla, who became pregnant with one of the couple’s fertilized eggs early this year. During Georgie’s birth, “I was playing Dave Matthews‘s song ‘You and Me’ and I could not stop sobbing. Then the baby came out, and it was so much relief,” she says. “I felt like I could breathe again.”

The years of struggle put a strain on her marriage, but Lipinski even sees the beauty it that now. “It gave us time to figure out how to support each other,” she says of Kapostasy. “I would have loved for us to not have gone through all this. But now, I can’t imagine it any other way.”