An early season win at Omloop van het Hageland. A stage win within the Vuelta España Femenina. Nationwide street racing champion. Two gold medals on the Paris Olympics. If, in 2019, you’d advised Kristen Faulkner in regards to the season she’d be having in 2024, she’d in all probability have scoffed.
At the same time as she crossed the end line of the Olympic street race, a shock victor in entrance of the Eiffel Tower, after using with the power and experience of somebody with 3 times her expertise, Faulkner was in disbelief.
“I knew I received, I believe it took me a little bit bit to be like, Is that this actual life? Am I dreaming? It was plenty of feelings,” she tells Biking Weekly.
Within the meantime, she simply pedalled on. She didn’t punch the air in pleasure. She didn’t get off her bike to make some grand gesture. She barely even smiled. She simply pedalled on, her ideas already shifting to the Workforce Pursuit two days forward.
“I completed the street race, and my first thought after I crossed the road was, I must maintain spinning, I’ve a race in two days,” Faulkner recalled. “I had talked about restoration with my staff the day earlier than the street race, as a result of I knew that it could be an enormous element if I did the street race that I needed to be prepared [for the next race].”
A giant “If” as a result of Faulkner was by no means meant to race the street race. She was referred to as as much as put her highly effective engine to make use of within the Workforce Pursuit, an occasion by which Workforce USA has medaled in each Olympics since 2012. However when triathlete Taylor Knibb withdrew from the occasion, committing solely to the person time trial outdoors of her triathlon duties, Faulkner was requested to fill in. But, her focus was squarely positioned on the observe occasion with directions to be good within the street race, preserve and, above all, get well in time for the observe biking occasion.
And so, as a substitute of celebrating Workforce USA’s first street racing medal in 40 years, Faulkner thought of restoration.
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“We truly made a plan for a way I may very well be most recovered. Restoration shake, drink combine, rollers instantly, ice tub – all that. So, yeah, I crossed [the finish] and I used to be like, I might cease, however I sort of must spin the legs,” Faulkner stated.
Whereas the photographers on the end line might have been left with out the celebratory shot they hoped for, her focus paid off. Two days later, a second gold medal was hung from her neck. Even then, the celebration was transient. Two days of photoshoots and interviews and Faulkner was off once more, travelling north to Rotterdam, the Netherlands, for the largest race on the ladies’s calendar: the eight-day Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift.
Kristen Faulkner in her new equipment and on her new bike: each sport the crimson, white and blue of the US nationwide street racing champion and a golden component for her Olympic Gold medal within the street race
(Picture credit score: Getty Pictures)
On the eve earlier than the beginning, Faulkner obtained a brand new equipment—a golden ribbon added to the sleeves and collar of the crimson, white and blue EF–Oatly–Cannondale equipment.
“I solely have one [kit] thus far, so we’re going to should do plenty of laundry this week,” a giddy Faulkner advised Biking Weekly.
On the Tour, Faulkner can be using a model new Cannondale Lab71 race bike, full with a tri-colour paint job and adorned with golden stars.
It’s been an absolute whirlwind for the 31-year-old Alaskan. And she or he admits it’s removed from sunk in. Solely after the Tour, she mused, would she really have an opportunity to calm down and let the enormity of her accomplishments sink in. However the preliminary emotions are of affirmation and validation.
“The largest factor I’ve been occupied with is how large of a danger and sacrifice it took to go away my job and the way scary it was. And the way after I left my job so few individuals thought I might do something with biking,” Faulkner shared.
Faulkner was 24 when she swung a leg round a street bike for the primary time, at a girls’s biking clinic in New York Metropolis’s Central Park. She turned professional with the now-defunct TIBCO-Silicon Valley Financial institution girls’s staff three years later, in 2020, at age 27.
“I began late, I used to be new, I used to be shifting the world over the place I didn’t know anyone in Girona, I used to be making barely any cash that first yr and I believe it simply validated that I ought to belief my intestine extra typically. After I left my job, the one factor I had was my intestine intuition. I pursued one thing I used to be keen about and it labored. I hope that message resonates with some extra individuals.”
Her achievements have definitely ignited a media storm round her and her fellow American girls cyclists. In Paris, the U.S. riders impressed, incomes bronze within the girls’s particular person time trial, gold within the street race, gold within the girls’s staff pursuit, gold additionally within the girls’s omnium and silver within the girls’s cross-country mountain bike race.
“I hope it brings biking again on the map for Individuals,” commented Faulkner. “Biking is just not a really large sport in America. It hasn’t been for a very long time. I hope that we are able to parlay this into getting extra individuals on bikes in America and extra viewership for girls’s biking.”
Faulkner is presently racing within the Tour de France Femmes, the place she hopes to go for phases the place she hopes to go for phases if the alternatives come up and assist her teammates.
“I enter [the Tour] with plenty of confidence in my kind, my health and in addition my psychological state,” she commented. “I am in a extremely, actually good temper.”
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