The Sound and the Fury

Kristen Faulkner's Olympic road race gold medal was only an upset on paper

Photo Credit: SprintCyclingAgency

¹At the risk of being overly credulous or maudlin, the Olympic road races ended up producing one of the best weekends of racing all year. Some little Belgian guy posted up for one of the coolest sports photographs I can remember.

@nbcsportsRemco Evenepoel wins Olympic cycling road race to complete historic gold medal double. 🥇🥇 #ParisOlympics #Cycling

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Wow, the Eiffel Tower is bigger than I thought it was. Anyway, credit to Paris for leaning into its whole city-of-landmarks identity and intentionally distributing its events across the most picturesque venues possible.²

The men’s road race lived up to its billing, although the end result—an Evenepoel win following about 60 kilometers of persistent attacks—was less surprising than the fact that it resulted from perfect team tactics from a normally fractious Belgian squad. Part of the reason Evenepoel was able to escape was the fact that Wout van Aert was draped all over Mathieu van der Poel. Nobody would work to bring Evenepoel back, knowing it was a virtual certainty that van Aert would catch a free ride to a reduced bunch sprint, which he would be a mortal lock to win. Remco becomes the first man to win the road race-ITT Olympic double, France goes 2-3 with Valentin Madouas and Christophe Laporte,³ allons enfants de la Patrie, le jour de gloire est arrivé, and so on and so forth.

Don’t care. Because, thanks to a 31-year-old Alaskan who wasn’t even supposed to be there:⁴

This is being cast as some massive upset. And from 30,000 feet, I guess that’s true. The silver bronze medalist was Lotte Kopecky, who is for my my money the best female cyclist on the planet right now. Bronze Silver medal: Marianne Vos, who is for my money the best female cyclist ever.

So yeah, Faulkner isn’t quite as decorated. Certainly not considering she only began cycling seriously in her 20s and only turned pro in the past five years.⁵

But in her brief professional career—especially in the past 18 months—Faulkner has been a complete animal. She almost won Strade Bianche last year. She won a stage of the Vuelta this year, set up Alison Jackson to win another stage, won Omloop Van Het Hageland on a 50-kilometer solo break, and won the U.S. national road race championship. Before this weekend, I pegged her as a potential gold medal winner, albeit not in exactly this fashion.

Oh, I Don't Know, I Don't Know, Oh, Where to Begin. We Are North Americans.

On Sunday, Faulkner was doing more work, putting down more power, doing more to animate the race than anyone else in the peloton. I don’t know if she rode a perfect tactical race, but at every step of the race she did exactly what I was screaming at the TV for her to do.

And I was screaming at the TV, which is unusual. My elevator pitch for cycling, to normie sports fans, is that it’s like baseball: It’s pretty background colors to look at while you sit around waiting for the one instant where everything goes wrong. It’s an emotional appeal. But absent real team commitment—I say I’m an EF fan, a Richard Carapaz fan, a van Aert fan, but that’ll never reach the level of my being an Eagles fan, or even an Arsenal fan—sometimes it’s hard for me to really get out of my seat. I watch cycling hoping to see something interesting. Who wins is not as important as how.

The Olympics are different. National pride is on the line. Sporting events are the, um, arena where it’s least problematic⁶ to be rah-rah jingoistic, in a self-conscious, almost detached way. But also, as much as it’s become fashionable to denounce the United States as an inherently irredeemable institution in the kind of lefty circles I run in, it’s the only culture I’ve got. The only home I’ve got. And as much as I want to see elements of our civic religion, political norms, and social conventions torn out root and branch, I can’t pretend that this country is not me, for better or worse. There’s nothing contradictory about praising American accomplishments while decrying its shortcomings. Love and disappointment go hand in hand.

But I digress.

There’s a less high-handed reason Faulkner got me out of my seat on Sunday. Late bloomer though she may be, she is positively dynamic to watch.

In each of Faulkner’s four big wins this year—Omloop van Het Hageland, Stage 4 of the Vuelta, the national championships, and the Olympics—she has exhibited a capacity for flat-ground power that is self-evidently world-class. I’ve compared her to Mathieu van der Poel in the past, and as queasy as some people get about cross-gender comps, I don’t know who else in the women’s peloton rides with this level of big-ass chugga-chugga explosiveness over the span of a few kilometers. I would’ve said Kopecky, but…

Only one aspect of Faulkner’s gold medal ride was fluky. (Watch the highlights here. Ordinarily I’d embed the video but NBC and the IOC don’t allow it for the Olympics.)

With 48 kilometers left, the peloton was winding through a ridiculously narrow section of downtown Paris when Faulkner’s teammate, Chloe Dygert, wiped out going around a corner. Again.

That split the peloton, because even though nobody got seriously hurt, the road had been narrowed so much by temporary fencing that more than half the peloton had to wait for everyone to get up and carry on.

It could not have worked out better for Faulkner, who was in the first three wheels and went straight to the front and pegged it. The Dutch favorites, Lorena Wiebes and Demi Vollering, were caught behind. It was so fortuitous my first thought at the time was of Crashgate, the hugely controversial Formula 1 incident when Renault staged a crash on the narrow Singapore street circuit to force a yellow flag that would advantage Fernando Alonso.

Faulkner quickly found herself in a lead group that featured exactly one rider from several different countries, and three from Great Britain. A few riders Faulkner could not reasonably expect to beat heads-up: Kopecky, Vos, Elisa Longo Borghini, maybe time trial silver medalist Anna Henderson.

But GB, being the best-represented team in the group, upped the pace to keep the rest of the contenders—i.e. Wiebes and Vollering—from catching them. And as the survivors crested the Montmartre over and over, they attritted off the back, one by one, like characters in a slasher movie.

The lone successful escape came from Hungary’s Blanka Vas, who took Vos with her.⁷

That left Faulkner and Kopecky to dispense with the rest of the lead group, and to chase down the two escapees, who by that point had stretched their lead to around 30 seconds.

This Faulkner did on the final hill. And even as she goaded Kopecky into cooperating, Faulkner did all of the work. The gap disappeared rapidly; Vas is the weakest of the four riders, and Vos—as the best sprinter, or at least co-sprint favorite with Kopecky—had little incentive to cooperate.

But the catch didn’t happen quite as quickly as I expected, because one of two things had happened to Kopecky. Either she was soft-pedaling, hoping to catch a free ride from Faulkner, who was presumably just happy to contend for a bronze, and save her energy for the sprint showdown with Vos. Or she just didn’t have the legs.

Faulkner had plenty of gas left in the tank. And when she made the junction, dragging Kopecky back to Vos, the four leaders joined back up right as they swung around a wide right-handed about three kilometers from the finish at the Trocadero.

Between the crash, and desperate attempts from Dygert, Wiebes and Vollering to climb back up the finishing order, and the gradual deterioration of the original escape group, the first 20 or 30 riders on the road were scattered about in very small groups. Ones and twos, mostly.

Whenever these groups encountered each other, globbing together like water droplets on a pool cover, there was a momentary pause as everyone looked around for someone else to do the work. This is the game theory element of cycling; nobody wants to end up on the wrong end of the Prisoners’ Dilemma after four hours of hard racing.

There’s a school of thought that says, when you catch the group in front, you don’t slow down. You go over the top and keep riding. Not only do you avoid falling victim to the breakdown in cooperation that comes from any junction, you maintain your momentum. And who knows, maybe the previous leaders won’t expect an attack from behind. This is what GB’s Lizzie Deignan had done earlier in the race, though she was brought back quickly.

As Faulkner crept up on Vas and Vos, with Kopecky in her wheel, sure enough the two leaders pulled up to take a look around. Both stopped pedaling and Vas swung way over to the right-hand side of the road to take stock of the situation.

Faulkner didn’t hesitate for a second. She stamped on the pedals just as she rounded that right-hander in front of the Louvre. Had Vos or Kopecky been in second position, maybe they could have accelerated to catch the American, but within a second Faulkner had multiple bike lengths on her pursuers. In 10 seconds, she was gone.

This was the perfect rider for that moment: A few seconds of enormous power, followed by just three or four minutes of Go Like Hell. Faulkner kept looking back, expecting, daring her three chasers to pull her in. But Vos and Kopecky each waited for the other to do the work, and it was immediately clear that their split second of brinksmanship had given Faulkner a lead that no amount of cooperation could erase.

I want to go back to the idea that this was an upset. I guess it was, because, again, best rider on the planet and best of all time vs. relative novice. Faulkner wasn’t on the original startlist; she was originally prepared to focus entirely on the team pursuit on the track, while Taylor Knibb rode the road race alongside Dygert.

You can’t drop a bidon on the internet without hitting “Harvard rower” and “former venture capitalist” like Faulkner’s some kind of dilettante. She’s not. She didn’t hop off a Peloton in the basement of her Wall Street office building and into the Olympics.

We’re four years removed from Anna Kiesenhoffer, a semiprofessional Austrian rider and mathematics PhD, winning the Olympic road race gold medal. That was an upset. But the fact that Faulkner is new to the sport doesn’t make her a novelty. Don’t confuse inexperience with luck.

Knibb, a triathlete by day, dropped out because Faulkner actually had a shot to medal. And while it’s unheard of for, say, the best player on the Goldman Sachs company basketball team to make it to the WNBA, cycling is different. If you’ve got big enough lungs and a stomach for speed, you can get on a bike for the first time after college and ride the Tour de France. At the start of this season, Faulkner wasn’t the most decorated American cyclist on her own trade team who came to bike racing from another sport in her mid-20s.

But most of all, this wasn’t Villanova shooting 78 percent from the floor to beat Patrick Ewing’s Georgetown. This wasn’t Jim Craig standing on his head while Tikhonov panicked and pulled Tretiak, or Boise State needing every page of the playbook to squeak past Oklahoma.

Faulkner went heads-up against the best riders in the world and bullied them. She fucked their shit up. She was faster, stronger, smarter, and cooler than anyone else in the race. Did a 31-year-old ex-investment banker get the drop on two world champions? Sure. But she could do it again tomorrow if she had to.

1. I apologize for going with the most obvious Faulkner reference imaginable, I was so charged up writing this I had nothing left in the tank for the headline

2. Apart from the above, archery at the Hôtel des Invalides is my favorite so far

3. With Laporte illustrating what would’ve happened had van Aert latched onto a successful pursuit group.

4. Like John McClane in the various Die Hard movies

5. More on that below

6. As someone who’s deeply concerned about the direction of the country now, and who lived through the dogmatic and performative “patriotism” of the Bush years

7. The Vos-Vas combination gave no end of trouble to NBC play-by-play man Steve Schlanger, who at one point called Vas “Kasia Blanc,” but I think Schlanger did admirably all things considered. That duo would’ve given Phil Liggett a stroke.