‘That’s my signature move’: How Harvard’s Kristen Faulkner made Olympic cycling history and beat the best in the world - The Boston Globe (2024)

“I couldn’t celebrate,” Faulkner said. “I couldn’t, you know, have some champagne, I had to really get back into mode for racing.

“I think it’s been, like, a lot of back-to-back, focus on the next thing. I think it’ll really sink in after the Tour, when I’m home in Girona and can just like, you know, starfish and relax.”

Much has been made in recent weeks of Faulkner’s unlikely rise to the top of professional cycling, which didn’t include junior championships or a childhood on the bike. She rowed at Harvard and earned a degree in computer science before starting a career in venture capital.

She first clipped into pedals as part of a clinic in Central Park in 2017, and she was hooked. A hobby became a passion and then a profession; she only left her day job to compete full-time in 2021.

Faulkner started finding success internationally in 2022, winning multiple stages (and the mountains classification) of that year’s Giro d’Italia Women and taking second in the Tour de Suisse. She won the time trial event at the 2023 Pan American Games, then a US national road race title this May.

Faulkner was planning to compete in the team pursuit in Paris but had a suspicion she may end up taking on the road race. That proved correct when Taylor Knibb withdrew to focus on the triathlon.

So there was Faulkner at the head of the chase pack, hunting down a two-woman breakaway led by three-time world road race champion Marianne Vos of the Netherlands. Faulkner and Belgium’s Lotte Kopecky, the defending road race world champion, reeled in Vos and Hungary’s Blanka Vas through the courtyard of the Louvre to make it a four-woman race with just over 2 miles to go.

That’s when Faulkner attacked, shifting gears as the racers crossed the Seine and putting an injection of pace into the 98-mile race. She knew Vos and Vas would be tired after leading for more than an hour, and she sensed that Kopecky, who wasn’t closing the gap whenever the Belgian led the chase pack, was gassed too.

“I knew that of the four of us going to the finish, I would be the slowest sprinter, and so if I went to the finish with them, I wouldn’t get a medal,” Faulkner explained. “And so the only way I could win, and the only way I could get a medal, is if I attack them, and the best moment to attack would be as soon as we caught them, because it would catch them by surprise.

“It was very calculated, my move. I thought about it long before it happened. And actually, the first time I saw the course about a year ago, I said, you know, ‘I’m going to attack at the top of the last climb, and if it doesn’t work, I’m going to attack on that last section.’

“So I definitely thought about it in the months before the race, and then also during the race. I said, ‘That’s where I have to go.’ ”

Some of the best cyclists in the world could only watch. Vos, Vas, and Kopecky looked around at each other before dropping their heads and their cadence, opting to save their energy to battle each other for the two remaining medals as Faulkner’s lead ballooned from 5 meters to 50 in the blink of an eye.

“That’s my signature move,” Faulkner said with a laugh. “That’s how I win races all the time. I think some people have said, ‘Oh, I’m surprised that she went there,’ but if you look at my race results and you look at how I won races, it’s always that way.”

The race for gold was over, and Faulkner powered home across the finish line in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower as the first US Olympic champion in the road race in 40 years.

But she wasn’t quite done making history. There was the small matter of the team pursuit on the track, where she was part of an American foursome that claimed the first US Olympic gold in the women’s event. That made Faulkner the first US woman to win gold in multiple disciplines (track and road cycling) at the same Games.

Faulkner got plenty of messages from old colleagues and entrepreneurs from her time at Bessemer Venture Partners before getting swept up in the media storm. But the responses that meant the most came from Homer, a small fishing village of about 5,500 people in rural Alaska, which can now claim a two-time Olympic champion as one of its own.

“It’s just a really small-knit town,” Faulkner said. ”My neighbor is my teacher. My mom was friends with my swim coach. These people have known me since I was born. My whole town raised me … and so they’re just so excited to see someone that they’ve known in diapers on the world stage now.

“When I finished my race, actually, I told the media manager, ‘I’ll do interviews with the big publications, but I also am going to do interviews with the local radio station in my hometown.’ I don’t care if it’s two people who listen or 200 or 2,000 or 200,000, I’m going to do it. Because those people helped get me where I am, and they made me.

“The Homer, Alaska, radio station, it’s on par with the New York Times, or, you know, NBC. Like, we’re going to do both of them. It’s either both or none.”

Amin Touri can be reached at amin.touri@globe.com.