The ladies’s Olympic highway race will happen this weekend, on August 4 at 8 a.m. ET, and 95 ladies might be combating for an opportunity at a medal.
For the two American ladies racing, Chloé Dygert and Kristen Faulkner, there’s further motivation on the road figuring out that no American girl has medaled in Olympic highway racing in 40 years.
A Dynamic Duo Pulling Double Obligation
(Picture credit score: Getty Pictures)
Dygert is not any stranger to rising to the event on the Olympics; she is now a three-time medalist, having earned her third medal – a silver one – in the person time trial just some days in the past.
This might be Faulkner’s first Olympics, and after rising to skilled biking prowess on an accelerated timeline after solely studying to experience competitively in 2020, the Alaskan is more likely to be hungry to make a reputation for herself in Paris.
Each Dygert and Faulkner are pulling double responsibility for Workforce USA. Along with the highway occasion(s), they’re additionally integral components of the Workforce Pursuit on the velodrome.
Whereas Workforce USA has medaled within the Workforce Pursuit prior to now three Olympics, there’s historical past to be made within the highway race. The final time an American girl medaled within the highway race was within the very first Olympic highway race in 1984, when Connie Carpenter and Rebecca Twigg took gold and silver, respectively.
Connie Carpenter
(Picture credit score: United States Olympic and Paralympic Museum)
Thought-about one of many greats of girls’s biking, Connie Carpenter-Phinney (sure, that Phinney. She’s married to Davis Phinney and Taylor Phinney is their son) made historical past by being the primary, and thus far solely, American girl to earn a gold medal within the Olympic highway race.
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She took the highest spot on the Olympic podium in 1984, which was the debut 12 months for girls’s highway racing within the Video games.
For Carpenter-Phinnet these 1984 weren’t her first Olympics, nevertheless. She started her sporting profession as a long-distance pace skater and competed within the 1972 Sapporo Winter Olympics when she was 14 years previous. She positioned seventh within the 1,500-meter pace skating occasion.
After a pace skating-induced ankle damage sidelined her in 1976, Carpenter-Phinney picked up biking to cross-train and rapidly grew to become a dual-elite athlete.
She discovered a second love in biking and started competing in bike races within the late Seventies, successful 12 whole U.S. nationwide titles in highway and observe biking earlier than being chosen for Workforce USA for the inaugural ladies’s Olympic highway race. The race consisted of a 79.2-kilometre route by means of Los Angeles, the place she edged out her teammate Rebecca Twigg, successful gold by simply half a wheel size on the end line.
Carpenter-Phinney can be a seasoned rower who helped the UC Berkeley ladies’s crew staff win the 1980 nationwide championship for girls’s coxless fours.
Since her unbelievable achievement on the 1984 Video games, Carpenter-Phinney has been inducted into the U.S. Bicycling Corridor of Fame, married, and raised two athletically gifted kids: Kelsey Phinney, a Nordic ski racer, and Taylor Phinney, a now-retired former skilled bicycle owner and Olympian.
Rebecca Twigg
(Picture credit score: Getty Pictures)
Rebecca Twigg, now in her early 60s, has had almost the polar reverse expertise post-Olympic medal as Carpenter-Phinney.
Twigg found biking at a younger age and, like Carpenter-Phinney, took to it with ease and pleasure, saying that the one time she fell was when she realized on a experience as a baby that she didn’t know easy methods to cease and barreled right into a wall.
She was scouted at age 17 by well-known biking coach Eddie Borysewicz who helped her kick off her biking profession first in highway racing, after which in observe, particularly, the person pursuit. At her peak, Twigg was racing greater than 60 instances per 12 months.
The Seattle-born bicycle owner rose to large fame within the Nineteen Eighties and 90s successful six biking world championships and two Olympic medals throughout three Video games.
Twigg’s first Olympics began with a bang: she represented the U.S. within the ladies’s highway race, the place she earned a silver medal subsequent to Carpenter-Phinney’s gold one.
She then returned to the Video games on the 1992 Barcelona Olympics the place she earned a bronze medal within the 3,000-meter particular person pursuit. Her ultimate Olympics look was on the 1996 Atlanta Olympics the place she positioned fifth in the identical occasion.
Regardless of her large success in biking, Twigg has struggled in her post-Olympic days and as of 2019 thought-about herself homeless, in response to the Seattle Instances.
Twigg shared within the Seattle Instances article that making an attempt to work a extra conventional job after the joys of her biking profession didn’t resonate together with her and she or he by no means discovered a “good match” after being so in love together with her earlier job {of professional} biking.
Twigg stated she vacillates between dwelling with family and friends, in homeless shelters and even underneath rubbish luggage on the road downtown. It has been years since she rode a motorcycle.
Twigg just isn’t hooked on medication or alcohol, however described herself as “confused” with what to do together with her life.
“Among the onerous days are actually painful if you’re coaching for racing,” Twigg stated within the Seattle Instances article, “however being homeless, when you might have little hope or information of the place the end line goes to be, is simply as onerous.”
As Dygert and Faulkner equipment up for the ladies’s highway race on August 4, they’ll undoubtedly be gunning to interrupt the 40 12 months drought of U.S.-earned medals within the ladies’s highway race, figuring out that they’ve some very large and really significant sneakers to fill.
