Kristen Faulkner ended America’s 40-year drought at the Paris Olympics, a sport she took up as a hobby six years ago.
On Sunday, the 31-year-old became the first American to win a gold medal in the women’s road race since Connie Carpenter won gold at the 1984 Los Angeles Games.
Faulkner grew up hiking and boating in Homer, Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula, and joined Harvard’s women’s crew team, graduating in 2016.
She started cycling in 2017 when she moved to New York to work as a venture capitalist.
“I still needed that outdoor fix that was a big part of my life,” the Olympian told NBC News in a recent interview.
Faulkner wasn’t even scheduled to compete in the 2024 Paris Olympics, but he joined Team USA in early July after Taylor Knibb withdrew from the road race to focus on Olympic time trial and triathlon competitions. Convened.
“This is a dream come true,” she told reporters after the race. “I still look at the finish line sign and wonder how my name got there.”
Leaving a career in finance to become a full-time athlete
Faulkner enrolled in an introductory women’s cycling clinic in New York City’s Central Park and by 2020 was racing for Team TIBCO Silicon Valley Bank, North America’s longest-running professional women’s cycling team at the time. It became.
In early 2021, she left her venture capital job to focus on sports full-time. She thought this would be a bit of a detour from her career.
“I thought, ‘This is going to take two or three years,'” she told The Wall Street Journal.
Instead, Faulkner, who now plays for the American Continental women’s team EF Autry Cannondale, said she developed a greater passion for the sport: competitive spirit, camaraderie with teammates and constant training. Faulkner currently lives in San Francisco and rides his bike about 80 miles a day.
She told The Associated Press that her career as a venture capitalist contributed to her success as a professional athlete.
“I learned how to calculate risk and assess risk,” she said. “In racing, you have the mindset of what’s the risk-reward ratio? Knowing when to give it your all.”
Overcoming career-threatening injuries to win Olympic gold medal
Faulkner did not qualify for the Olympics.
Last year, she was hit by a car while training in California and broke her shin bone. She told The Wall Street Journal that she feared the injury would end her career as a competitive cyclist. She took about three months off from riding.
“I said I would only enter a road race if I felt I had the strength and had a chance for a medal,” Faulkner told The Associated Press. “I knew it was going to be a really tough race, but if I was going to race, I was going to race to win. That was my promise to my Team Pursuit teammates.”
This 98-mile road race starts and finishes in Paris and ends at the Trocadero along several hilly routes with the Seine River and Eiffel Tower in the background.
She has stated in several interviews that her upbringing in Alaska instilled in her the strength and resilience necessary to overcome that injury and believe in herself to compete on the world stage.
“It’s never a question of whether to continue, it’s just a question of how,” Faulkner told NBC News.
Faulkner is currently aiming for her second Olympic medal. In team pursuit, he and his three American teammates compete against cyclists from other countries on a track. The event begins with qualifying on Tuesday.
Although her gold medal win was unexpected, it was a childhood dream come true for Faulkner, who had wanted to compete in the Olympics ever since watching the 2000 Sydney Olympics from home. It will be.
“I thought this was great to see,” she said in an interview with Global Cycling Network in March. “At that moment, going to the Olympics became my life goal.”
She continued, “It wasn’t about gaining a certain level of credibility in the sport. It was about the little girl inside me and what dreams she had as a child.”
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