Kristen Faulkner ended a 40-year drought for the U.S. at the Paris Olympics — in a sport she took up for fun six years ago.
On Sunday, the 31-year-old became the first American rider to win gold in the women’s road event since Connie Carpenter did so at the 1984 Los Angeles games.
Faulkner grew up hiking and rowing in Homer, Alaska, a small town on the Kenai Peninsula, and joined the women’s crew team at Harvard University, where she graduated in 2016.
She didn’t take up competitive cycling until 2017, when she moved to New York to work as a venture capitalist.
“I still needed the external adjustment that was such a big part of my life,” the Olympian told NBC News in a recent interview.
Faulkner wasn’t even supposed to compete in the 2024 Paris Olympics, but was called up to Team USA in early July after Taylor Knibb resigned from her road race spot to focus on Olympic trials and events. triathlon.
“This is a dream come true,” she told reporters after the race. “I’m still looking at that finish line sign wondering how my name got there.”
I gave up a career in finance to be a full-time athlete
Faulkner signed up for an introductory women’s cycling clinic in New York City’s Central Park, and by 2020, she was racing for Team TIBCO-Silicon Valley Bank, then America’s longest-running professional women’s cycling team. North.
In early 2021, she left venture capital to pursue sports full-time—a move she assumed would be a short diversion from her career.
“I was like, ‘This is going to be a two, three-year thing,'” she told the Wall Street Journal.
Instead, Faulkner, who now rides for the EF-Oatly-Cannondale U.S. Women’s Continental Team, said she has developed an even deeper passion for the sport: the competition, the camaraderie with her teammates, even the training. continuous. Faulkner, who now lives in San Francisco, commutes about 50 miles a day.
She told The Associated Press that her career as a venture capitalist has been instrumental in her success as a professional athlete.
“I learned how to calculate risks and assess risks,” she said. “Into a race I take this mentality with me: What’s the risk-reward ratio? Knowing when to go all out.”
Overcoming a career-threatening injury to win gold at the Olympics
Faulkner almost didn’t make it to the Olympics.
Last year, she was hit by a car while on a training ride in California, breaking her leg — an injury she feared would end her cycling career, she told Wall Street Journal. She took a break from riding for about three months.
“I said I would only do the road race if I felt strong and felt I had a chance at 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 racing to win. That was a promise I made to my teammates in the team pursuit.”
The 98-mile road race starts and finishes in Paris, stretching along several hilly roads and finishing at the Trocadéro, with the River Seine and the Eiffel Tower in the background.
She has mentioned in several interviews that her upbringing in Alaska instilled in her the strength and resilience she needed to overcome that injury and believe in herself to compete on a global stage.
“It’s never a question of whether I’m going to continue, it’s just a question of how,” Faulkner told NBC News.
Now, Faulkner is aiming for her second Olympic medal — in the team pursuit, where she will race on a track with three of her American teammates against cyclists from other countries. The event begins on Tuesday with qualifying.
Her gold medal win, while unexpected, is a childhood dream come true for Faulkner, who has said she has wanted to compete in the Olympics since watching the 2000 Sydney Games at home.
“I thought it was an amazing thing to see,” she said in an interview with the Global Cycling Network in March. “At that moment it became my life’s goal to go to the Olympic Games.”
She continued: “It’s never been about achieving a certain level of credibility in the sport, it’s about that little girl inside of me and what dreams she had as a child.”
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