Kristin Faulkner’s Olympic dream turned actuality on Thursday when she was nominated for the nation’s monitor biking group for Paris. The EF Schooling-Cannondale rider was the high contender to earn an computerized choice for USA Biking’s Olympic street group however missed the bid by 11 seconds when triathlete Taylor Knibb received the nationwide championship time trial.
Faulkner endured, heading straight from Charleston, West Virginia, after profitable the nationwide championship street race to USA Biking’s monitor biking camp in Belgium, the place she proved herself to the selectors.
“I dreamed of competing within the Olympics ever since I used to be 8 years previous, and I noticed it on TV. That is the most important dream I’ve ever had, and it is lastly come true!” Faulkner mentioned. “I’m past excited to characterize the USA alongside such a powerful group of athletes. I’ll do my greatest to convey house a medal for Workforce USA.”
The 31-year-old joins the extra established riders from the 2021 Olympic group pursuit squad, Chloé Dygert, Jen Valente and Lily Williams, with Olivia Cummins rounding out the fifth spot for the ladies’s Workforce Pursuit.
Grant Koontz was named as the only real male rider for the monitor biking occasions because the nation solely certified for one place for the lads’s Omnium and no different occasions.
Faulkner’s inclusion within the monitor group additionally opens the door for USA Biking to appoint her to interchange Knibb for the ladies’s street race, as guidelines enable replacements solely from athletes already nominated to groups in different biking disciplines.
Valente, the 2021 Olympic Omnium champion, will return to defend her title and likewise compete within the Madison with Williams.
“I am excited to formally be named to my third Olympic group,” Valente mentioned. “The Olympic Video games have at all times been particular to me, and this time round is simply as charming. The journey to Paris has been its personal distinctive course of with new challenges on this shortened quad. I am thrilled to be lining up alongside longstanding teammates and a few recent faces.”
Cummins is the youngest member of the group at 20.
“I nonetheless do not know tips on how to put into phrases what making this Olympic group means to me,” Cummins mentioned. “The Olympics have been by no means one thing I ever thought I’d be capable to obtain, so, it was by no means an enormous dream of mine rising up. It was one thing the well-known, skilled athletes did, not me. That’s, till a couple of yr in the past when I discovered myself able the place making this group turned a chance.
“I made the Olympics my dream a yr in the past, I dedicated absolutely to it, made sacrifices, and I made it occur. I am unable to wait to see this dream via this August in Paris!”
The 2024 Olympic Video games biking occasions begin on July 27, 2024, with the lads’s and girls’s particular person time trial. Cross Nation MTB follows on July 28-29. The boys’s and girls’s street races happen on August 3-4, whereas monitor racing commences on Monday, August 5 and lasts via the ultimate day of the Video games on August 11.
