Kristen Faulkner ended the United States’ 40-year drought at the Paris Olympics with a sport she took up recreationally six years ago.

The 31-year-old became the first American cyclist to win a gold medal in the women’s road race on Sunday since Connie Carpenter achieved the feat at the 1984 Los Angeles Games.

Faulkner grew up hiking and rowing in Homer, a small city on Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula, and joined the women’s rowing team at Harvard University, where she graduated in 2016.

He didn’t start competitive cycling until he moved to New York in 2017 to work as a venture capitalist.

“I still needed the outdoor activity that has taken up so much of my life,” the Olympic champion told NBC News in a recent interview.

Faulkner was not scheduled to compete in the 2024 Paris Olympics but was called up to Team USA in early July after Taylor Knibb relinquished his spot in the road race to focus on the Olympic time trial and triathlon events.

“This is a dream come true,” he told reporters after the race. “I still look at the finish line sign and wonder how my name got there.”

Leaving a career in finance to become a full-time athlete

Faulkner signed up for an introductory clinic to women’s cycling in New York City’s Central Park, and by 2020 she was riding for Team TIBCO-Silicon Valley Bank, then the longest-running professional women’s cycling team in North America.

In early 2021, he quit his venture capital job to invest in sports full time, a decision he thought would be a brief diversion from his career.

“I thought, ‘This is going to be a two-, three-year thing,'” he told the Wall Street Journal.

Instead, Faulkner, who now competes for the U.S. Continental Women’s Team EF-Oatly-Cannondale, said she has developed an even deeper passion for the sport: the competition, the camaraderie with her teammates, even the sheer intensity of the workouts. Faulkner, who now lives in San Francisco, cycles about 50 miles a day.

He told the Associated Press that his career as a venture capitalist was instrumental in his success as a professional athlete.

“I learned how to calculate and evaluate risks,” he said. “I take that mentality with me into a race: What is the risk-reward ratio? Knowing when to go all-in.”

Overcame career-threatening injury to win Olympic gold

Faulkner almost didn’t make it to the Olympics.

Last year, he was hit by a car during a training ride in California and suffered a fractured tibia — an injury he feared would end his cycling career, he told the Wall Street Journal. He took about three months off from cycling.

“I said I would only do the road race if I felt strong and had a chance to medal,” Faulkner told The Associated Press. “I knew it was going to be a really tough race, but if I was going to race, I was going to race to win. That was a promise I made to my teammates.”

The 98-mile road race starts and finishes in Paris, along hilly courses and finishes at the Trocadéro with the Seine River and Eiffel Tower in the background.

He has said in many interviews that growing up in Alaska instilled in him the strength and stamina he needed to overcome this injury and have the confidence to compete on a global stage.

“It’s not a matter of if I’m going to continue, it’s a matter of how I’m going to do it,” Faulkner told NBC News.

Faulkner is now aiming for his second Olympic medal — in the team pursuit, where he will compete on a track alongside three U.S. teammates against cyclists from other countries. The event begins with heats on Tuesday.

Faulkner said it was a childhood dream come true, albeit an unexpected one. Faulkner said he had wanted to compete in the Olympics since he watched the Sydney 2000 Games at home.

“It was an amazing thing to see,” he said in an interview with the Global Cycling Network in March. “At that moment, going to the Olympics became my life goal.”

She continued: “It was never about achieving a certain level of credibility in sports, it was about that little girl inside me and the dreams she had as a child.”

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