It all begins and ends between the stars and stripes. It ends after crossing the Jena bridge, when Kristen Faulkner She asks her compatriot Chloé Dygert for a photo of the two of them with the flag of her country. She starts an hour earlier, at the Moulin Rouge bend, where the cyclists turn onto the steep, cobbled Rue Lepic, and almost at the head of the pack, Dygert, the rider in the photo with Faulkner, falls and causes a riot that splits the group into pieces, with many of the favourites affected by the traffic jam. That was when the Olympic race began to be decided. It changed everything.
Faulkner was one of those who took advantage there, as was the intrepid Mavi García, who took the lead to increase the gap, or Marianne Vos, who would end up on the podium. There, too, the chances of Demi Vollering and Lorena Wiebes were buried. And it also seemed that another illustrious rider, Lotte Kopecky, would be among the victims, but the Belgian rider persevered alone to make up the difference she had lost in the traffic jam, and between the descent from the Sacre Coeur basilica and the wanderings through Paris, she managed to join those who, in the end, played for the rewards of the podium.
Medals are often won not only by having legs, as in cycling, but also by a series of favourable coincidences. For Faulkner, the penultimate was finding herself at the head of the pack when her teammate Dygert caused the bottleneck with her accident; the first, long gone, was her retirement from rowing to switch to cycling five years ago. The next was the withdrawal just a month ago of her compatriot Taylor Knibb from competing in the Games, which gave her a place on the road team, when she was initially only going to take part in the pursuit events on the track. The last was catching the ambition of the insatiable Lotte Kopecky in the final kilometres of the race, when Marianne Vos and Blanka Vas, Vos and Vas, had already been running away for some time and it seemed that the two of them would compete for the medals.
On the final climb to Montmartre, on the cobblestones, Belgian Kopecky accelerated, leaving the rest of her companions, including Mavi Garcia, behind, and only Faulkner could keep up. On the flat, it was the American who set the pace. When, after crossing the Louvre courtyard, she caught up with Vas and Vos, Faulkner already knew what she had to do. She was the slowest of the four in a sprint finish, but, accustomed to the track, it was going to be difficult to catch her if she gained a few metres, so as soon as she reached the wheel of the two in front, she launched a sharp attack that no one responded to. She had done the same in Zaragoza, in the Vuelta a España, to win a stage. “I knew that if we caught up with them, I had to attack because I couldn’t overtake any of them at the finish line,” Faulkner confessed. “The best place to attack was just after we arrived and we were all tied. That was my chance. I practiced my attack a few times this year, so I felt pretty comfortable with how I was doing it. I just hoped it would work.” It did.
With three kilometres to go, the lack of confidence between the other three became another factor in Kopecky’s luck. She turned onto the Jena bridge with almost a half-minute lead and crossed the finish line without raising her arms. “I was pretty sure I had won, but I couldn’t process it. It took me a few minutes. I had to double-check and triple-check that I had won gold. I knew it, but I didn’t know it.”
Then came the other three to compete for the medals in a tight race. Vos took the silver, Kopecky the bronze; the Hungarian Vas, the chocolate medal. Mavi García, who had a great race, finished sixth and will have an Olympic diploma. Then came Chloé Dygert, the one who started it all and had her photo taken with the flag, and Kristen Faulkner, the one who finished it all.
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