It's been silver, silver, bronze and now finally gold for Team USA in the women's Team Pursuit at the Paris Olympics. Chloé Dygert and Jen Valente, in their third attempt, Tokyo alternate Lily Williams and newcomer Kristen Faulkner pulled off a stunning upset against New Zealand in the gold medal final on Wednesday night, making Faulkner the only US athlete to ever win two gold medals in two different disciplines in the same Olympic Games.
Faulkner credited the coaches and staff for helping her make a meteoric rise in track cycling, having quickly come up through the ranks to be added to the line-up in international competition for the first time at the Adelaide Nations Cup in February of this year.
"It still doesn't feel real, to be honest. I think I'll wake up in a week and it still won't feel real," Faulkner said.
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"Originally my goal was to make the Olympics, then my goal was to take home a medal and to take home the gold is way more than I ever expected or even dreamed of. I think we just got to keep dreaming bigger and bigger things and hopefully there's more to come."
Faulkner might be the newest member of the team, but she's clearly the key to the winning formula, having stormed away from the greatest cyclist of all time Marianne Vos and World Champion Lotte Kopecky to claim the road race gold. The performance followed a victory on the road in the Vuelta Femenina and a stunning third place in Strade Bianche that was subsequently annulled for failing to remove her blood glucose monitor for the race.
Yet track cycling is a very specialised discipline, one that goes well beyond mere power - it takes control and skill to do smooth transitions between pulls and intense focus to stay on the wheels. Faulkner looked no different to her much more experienced teammates as they hurtled around the Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines velodrome.
"I think it says a lot about the coaches we've had and the team we have around us," Faulkner said. "I learned a lot in the past year from my teammates. I don't think I improved a lot in the last year just because of me. I hope there's more to come from this team as well."
Speaking of coaches, another key to the team's gold medal-winning performance was their trainer Gary Sutton, one of the most experienced in the business. Their victory had an added level of emotion that showed when Dygert was asked about Sutton's decision to retire at the end of this year after 50 years in the sport first as a rider, then as a coach, and seven years with USA Cycling.
"Gary is the best ever," Dygert said. "What a great way to end out his career. We have one more event with him, though, he's going to come to the World Championships at the end of the season, so that'll be his last big bang. You can see it in his eyes, you can see it in his face. This meant a lot for him. I'm just as happy for him as he is for us. He's just been so great for our program."
Sutton came into the programme after the Rio Olympics, moving from Cycling Australia to USA Cycling. The team worked for years trying to find the right riders to create the winning formula to join Dygert, Tokyo Omnium gold medalist Valente and Williams, testing several combinations to fill the void left by the tragic death of Kelly Caitlin in 2019.
"I've been part of the Team Pursuit program for a long time with a lot of different riders and we've been putting together different mixes of riders for years - to be able to pull together a really strong ride and have it actually pay off is a feeling that I am not going to forget," Valente said.
The medal they've been looking for
Dygert noted that USA Cycling has invested heavily in women's Team Pursuit since it was added to the Olympic programme ahead of the Beijing Games in 2008.
"When I came into the program in 2016, this was the medal that USA cycling was aiming for more than any other discipline. This has been the focus from the beginning of my career, and there's a lot of support in this program. And with the success that we have had, we were able to bring in strong riders. We recruited Lily, we recruited Faulkner and now we're able to finally pull it off."
The arrival of Faulkner breathed new life into the team - her strength quite obvious by her stunning victory in the women's road race - but the gold medal also required more maturity from time trial world champion Dygert, which she freely admitted in the post-race scrum.
"I was very stubborn - I think me kind of getting over my myself and trying to be a better teammate on and off the bike, I think that really helped pull it together a lot," Dygert said. "I had a whole road program just like the other girls did, when I was focused on the time trial I wasn't always there with the team, and I know that was really hard for them." Forming better relationships off the bike, she said, helped them on the bike."
Still, one got a sense that the US women could have gone even faster with more cohesion. Dygert started to pull away in the final two laps, forcing Williams and Faulkner to scramble to get back to her to come across the line, with the time taken on the third rider. It might have cost them a world record.
"I don't exactly know what happened," Dygert said, "But it's a win, and that's really all we wanted. Anything extra would have great but the gold medal is what we aimed for today."
Faulkner also agreed the team didn't exactly put together the perfect ride even if their time, 4:03.306, was sixth-tenths of a second quicker than New Zealand and 0.064 seconds shy of the world record.
"It wasn't perfect in any of our rides. But I think individually we're all capable of so much, and really pulling them together as a team is what made the difference today."
"I actually think if we kept it together a little better, we could have gone faster," Valente added.
Williams agreed the team didn't train together as much as they would have liked. "Three of us do full-time road calendars, which obviously has its benefits. We did our best with what we could, and we did a full preparation for this. I think it worked out better than we expected."
Sutton told Cyclingnews that he is leaving behind a list of "outstanding young athletes" on the whiteboard in his office as the nation begins to rebuild toward their home Olympics in Los Angeles in 2028.
"That'll be the start of the next journey. I know Jen will retire, there's no question. I think if they do it right, the USA have certainly got some great young talent. Olivia Cummins is here and she was so close to making this team, it's not funny. She probably would have made any other team apart from the US, which is a bit sad, really. She's such a talented young lady. I think she's gonna be the leader of a new group coming in."
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