Team USA Is Golden In Women’s Team Pursuit, Kristen Faulkner Becomes First U.S. Woman to Win Olympic Gold in Two Different Disciplines

MONTIGNY-LE-BRETONNEUX, France — Team USA has made the women’s team pursuit podium ever since the track cycling discipline made its Olympic debut in 2012, with two silvers and a bronze.

Now the foursome competing in team pursuit at the Olympic Games Paris 2024 has gold.

Jennifer Valente, Chloé Dygert, Kristen Faulkner, and Lily Williams beat New Zealand’s squad by 0.621 of a second over 4 kilometers to claim the U.S.’s first Olympic gold medal in team pursuit.

“It feels good, really good,” said Williams, who was on the team that won the Olympic bronze medal at the Tokyo Olympic Games in 2020.

With the gold, Faulkner, 31, and Dygert, 27, made history. Each won an Olympic medal in road cycling last week: a surprise gold for Faulkner in the road race, bronze for Dygert in the individual time trial, even after she crashed in the race.

With two Olympic gold medals, Faulkner became the third woman in history to win in two different disciplines (track cycling and road cycling) at a single Olympic Games. The others were Leontien Ziljaard-van Moorsel of the Netherlands (also in track and road cycling) in 2000, and Esther Ledecka of the Czech Republic in alpine skiing and snowboarding in 2018.

And Faulkner and Dygert became the first athletes to win two Olympic medals of any color in a single Games for Team USA since 1948, and only the third and fourth USA women — after Aileen Riggins in 1920 and Katherine Rawls in 1936, both in swimming and diving.

“I’m still pinching myself,” said Faulkner, who took up cycling in 2016 after taking a free clinic in New York City’s Central Park; she didn’t try track cycling for another three years. “I think I’ll wake up in a week, and it still won’t feel real. It’s going to take a long time for this to sink in.”

For USA Cycling, a gold in team pursuit is the medal that the track program has been pursuing since 2012. The ideal team pursuit squad has been “meticulously put together year after year,” Valente explained.

“We've been putting together different mixes of riders for years,” added Valente, 29, who first competed at the senior world championships a decade ago. “To be able to pull together a really strong ride and have it actually pay off is, it's a feeling that I am not going to forget.”

This particular mix of women did not come together until last November, with Faulkner the newest member. Valente, Dygert, and Williams all competed on the 2020 Olympic team pursuit — and Valente and Dygert in 2016. The two women also have four world championships in the team pursuit on their resumes, Williams with one.

Dygert and Valente helped recruit first Williams, 30, before the Tokyo Games, then Faulkner for Paris.

“There's just a lot of support in this program,” said Dygert, of U.S. women’s track cycling. “With the success that we have had, we were able to bring in the strongest riders.”

A former collegiate runner at Vanderbilt University (she set a Florida high school state record in the mile), Williams also took up cycling in 2016 after moving to Evanston, Illinois, to pursue a master’s degree in science, health, and environmental journalism at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. Her mother, Sarah Docter, competed in speed skating at the 1980 Olympic Winter Games as a 15-year-old, and her aunt, Mary Docter, is a four-time Olympic speed skater (1980-1992).

Williams helped the U.S. win gold in the 2020 world championships, then a year later, bronze at the Tokyo Olympic Games.

In 2020, Faulkner quit her investment banking job in San Francisco and decided — with the support of her family — to focus full-time on pro cycling. Since she was seven years old, she had dreamed of competing in the Olympic Games.

The native of Homer, Alaska, was soon was turning heads with her cycling results on the road, with stages wins in the world’s biggest races, including the women’s versions of the Giro d’Italia, Vuelta Espana, and Tour de Suisse.

Although she had tried track cycling in 2019 at a velodrome in San Jose, California, Faulkner did not attend a national team camp until winter 2022, then returned to a camp in November 2023 and has been “pretty full gas on track since then,” she said. Although she qualified for the 2024 Olympic Games in track cycling, Faulkner just missed qualifying for the road team and only made it after Taylor Knibb gave up her spot in the road race (to focus on triathlon).

Dygert credited Faulkner’s work on the track with helping her win the surprise gold medal in the road race last week. In the final 5 kilometers of the road race, Faulkner counterattacked the pre-race favorites and powered to a solo victory.

“She’s been riding great this year,” said Dygert, after Faulkner won gold in the road race. “She has shown repeatedly that she has that power for those final moments. She’s put a lot of work in, she’s been doing a lot on the track, so that’s helped her.”

Coming to Paris, Faulkner — a Phillips Academy and Harvard graduate known for her meticulous preparation — did race-week simulations to ensure that she could recover in time from the road race to the team pursuit.

“I felt confident coming in here that I could recover fine for team pursuit,” Faulkner said, “and that's the only reason I did the road race.”

“Having that preparation done ahead of time was really important,” she added.

But with so little experience on the track, how would Faulkner do on the world’s toughest stage?

Track coach Gary Sutton was worried about Faulkner getting her bike up to speed quickly from the start and getting into pursuit formation. So before the gold medal final, he dropped her gear ratio by two inches. This would allow her to turn the cranks faster and get up to speed behind Valente, who’s ability to maintain an even pace each lap is almost metronomic.

For her part, Dygert also had to recover from road cycling last week — both the effort of the time trial and the crash. It’s just one in a series of tough breaks the eight-time world champion has had to recover from since she began competing in the senior ranks in 2016, the worst being a horrendous crash during the 2020 world champions time trial, where she fileted open her leg. Dygert suffered extensive blood loss and had to have several surgeries to repair the damage. Recovery took nine months. She made it to the starting line in Tokyo (delayed a year because of the pandemic) and helped the U.S. win bronze in the team pursuit.

Since 2021, Dygert has had surgery for a heart condition and suffered from Epstein-Barr virus, which caused extreme fatigue. She had moments where she considered giving up.

Dygert came to the velodrome outside Paris with stitches in her chin and on her leg. But the injuries did not slow her down. The U.S. team pursuit qualified in second place — behind New Zealand, the 2023 world championship silver medalists, but ahead of reigning world champs, Great Britain.

Then in the first round, they beat Great Britain to advance to the gold medal race against New Zealand.

With Valente powering the group off the line, the four women quickly got up to world-record speed.

“She's the best starter in the world,” said Sutton, who described Valente as one of the greatest track athletes of all time, now with four Olympic gold medals.

Although the group frayed in the final 1,000 meters, just falling off the world record, they had enough of a gap on New Zealand to win gold.

While many Olympians want to savor in the moment and not look ahead, Dygert seemed most excited about the future of the U.S. women’s endurance track cycling program.

“I’m really, really happy for this medal, but I’m already looking for the next thing,” she said. “I’m going to cherish this, but it doesn’t stop here. We’re going to keep going. There’s a lot to accomplish in the future.”

For Faulkner — who went from a little kid dreaming of being an Olympian, to being an alternate on the Olympic road cycling team, to now having her name etched in the record books — she echoed Dygert’s sentiments.

“Originally my goal was to make the Olympics, and then my goal was to take home a medal,” she said. “To take home two golds now, it's way more than I ever expected or even dreamed of. And I think we’ve just got to keep dreaming of bigger and bigger things, and hopefully there's more to come.”

An award-winning freelance writer based in Vermont, Peggy Shinn is in Paris covering her eighth Olympic Games. She has contributed to TeamUSA.org since its inception in 2008.