Kristin Faulkner’s Olympic dream grew to become actuality on Thursday when she was nominated for the nation’s monitor biking crew for Paris. The EF Education-Cannondale rider was the highest contender to earn an automated choice for USA Cycling’s Olympic highway crew however missed the bid by 11 seconds when triathlete Taylor Knibb received the nationwide championship time trial.
Faulkner continued, heading instantly from Charleston, West Virginia, after profitable the nationwide championship highway race to USA Cycling’s monitor biking camp in Belgium, the place she proved herself to the selectors.
“I dreamed of competing within the Olympics ever since I used to be 8 years previous, and I noticed it on TV. This is the largest dream I’ve ever had, and it is lastly come true!” Faulkner stated. “I’m past excited to symbolize the USA alongside such a powerful group of athletes. I’ll do my greatest to carry dwelling a medal for Team USA.”
The 31-year-old joins the extra established riders from the 2021 Olympic crew pursuit squad, Chloé Dygert, Jen Valente and Lily Williams, with Olivia Cummins rounding out the fifth spot for the ladies’s Team Pursuit.
Grant Koontz was named as the only real male rider for the monitor biking occasions because the nation solely certified for one place for the boys’s Omnium and no different occasions.
Faulkner’s inclusion within the monitor crew additionally opens the door for USA Cycling to appoint her to exchange Knibb for the ladies’s highway race, as guidelines permit replacements solely from athletes already nominated to groups in different biking disciplines.
Valente, the 2021 Olympic Omnium champion, will return to defend her title and likewise compete within the Madison with Williams.
“I’m excited to formally be named to my third Olympic crew,” Valente stated. “The Olympic Games have at all times been particular to me, and this time round is simply as fascinating. The journey to Paris has been its personal distinctive course of with new challenges on this shortened quad. I’m thrilled to be lining up alongside longstanding teammates and a few recent faces.”
Cummins is the youngest member of the crew at 20.
“I nonetheless do not know the way to put into phrases what making this Olympic crew means to me,” Cummins stated. “The Olympics had been by no means one thing I ever thought I might be capable of obtain, so, it was by no means an enormous dream of mine rising up. It was one thing the well-known, skilled athletes did, not me. That is, till a few 12 months in the past when I discovered myself able the place making this crew grew to become a risk.
“I made the Olympics my dream a 12 months in the past, I dedicated totally to it, made sacrifices, and I made it occur. I can not wait to see this dream by means of this August in Paris!”
The 2024 Olympic Games biking occasions begin on July 27, 2024, with the boys’s and girls’s particular person time trial. Cross Country MTB follows on July 28-29. The males’s and girls’s highway races happen on August 3-4, whereas monitor racing commences on Monday, August 5 and lasts by means of the ultimate day of the Games on August 11.
