Kristen Faulkner has only been cycling for seven years — the Alaska native taking up the sport as a hobby in Central Park while working as a venture capitalist in New York City — and she did not even qualify for the 2024 Olympics women’s road race.
Her specialty was track cycling, but she got the nod to compete in the 98-mile race after teammate Taylor Knibb dropped out to focus on the triathlon.
Faulkner will not be an afterthought anymore, though, as the 31-year-old became the first American woman to win gold at the road race in 40 years, shocking the field on Sunday in Paris.
Trailing Marianne Vos of the Netherlands and Hungary’s Blanka Vas in the final stretch of the race, Faulkner — who was in a chase group with Belgium’s Lotte Kopecky — chased down the leaders and with just over two miles remaining, exploded into an insurmountable lead that the trailing trio simply did not pursue.
Faulkner won the race by 58 seconds (3:59.23) while Vos took silver and Kopecky nabbed bronze in a photo finish that saw Hungary’s Vas narrowly miss out on the podium.
Born in Homer, AK Faulkner attended Harvard where she was a varsity rower while graduating with a BA in computer science. She moved to New York following graduation where she found cycling and continued the sport upon her relocation to San Francisco in 2018. By 2020, she joined Team Tibco–Silicon Valley Bank and won the women’s road time trial at the 2023 Pan Am Games.
