Kristen Faulkner has taken several leaps of faith over the years, notably from venture capital to bike racing, and 2024 marks another meaningful manoeuvre before mixing it up in the women’s peloton. In February the US rider will make her racing debut with EF Education-Cannondale in Europe, in what she sees as ‘a really intense year’ with the Paris Olympic Games looming in late summer.
The Alaska native took one of those leaps of faith in 2020 when she invested herself full time into pro cycling with Team Tibco-SVB. It paid dividends, where she won two stages at the Giro d’Italia Donne and was sixth in the ITT at Road World Championships in Wollongong in 2022, her first year on the Women’s WorldTour level at Jayco AlUla.
Her 2023 campaign ended late last October with a gold medal at the Pan-American Games individual time trial, after overcoming a season of disappointments and injuries. She then gave herself a break knowing 2024 was going to be ‘a really intense year’. It was that TT victory that gave her self-assurance for a new team and a new start.
“I hadn’t done a time trial in over a year, so I didn’t know exactly how to pace myself, I didn’t know exactly what power I should try to hit. I was really able to just focus on the TT and that was definitely beneficial for me. To see that I had come back and I was fully healthy again, it was a lot of emotions,” Faulkner said about the Pan-Ams title.
“I am able to go into winter training with that confidence, that I can show up in 2024 quite fit and healthy is a big deal for me. And I’m not just ‘kind of back’, I’m fully back.”
Known for her aggressive style of racing, Faulkner hit her stride at Strade Bianche, using a solo attack to come close to a victory, but her podium spot evaporated when the UCI disqualified her for wearing a glucose monitor.
Then following La Vuelta Femenina, she suffered a hairline fracture in her leg when a driver of car struck her while on a training ride in California, and that led to a blood clot in her lung. She was on blood thinners for three months, during which time doctors would not allow her to ride outside.
So the time inside led to missing the Tour de France Femmes and the Road World Championships. “It was like COVID all over again,” she told Cyclingnews.
“I was really upset to miss the World Championships because I was hoping to use it as an Olympic qualifying event. If I had gotten on the podium in the time trial, I would have been an automatic qualifier. So it just postponed a lot of my goals, and it adds to the challenge of 2024. I learned I have to be patient and the time will come. I have to control what I can control.”
One of the first things she did to control her career was to change teams. With a two-year contract with Jayco coming to an end in 2023, she landed on a return to a US-based squad on the Continental level. She never considered it a downgrade, only the best investment on all sides.
“I had several WorldTour offers this summer. And they were really strong teams that I was excited about. But I spoke to Jonathan Vaughters on the phone, and right after that first conversation, I called my agent and I said, you know, seal the deal. I was really excited about it.
“So, I hadn't ever had a conversation with a team that just felt so right, just felt like a good fit. Because of that, I felt really comfortable signing a three-year contract. And honestly, it's proved to be even better than I expected.”
After a big chunk of December and January on the track in Colorado Springs to work on sprints and technical skills, she travelled to Adelaide, Australia for time on a 250-metre velodrome with Team USA track riders.
It’s appealing to train on a track the same size as the Vélodrome National in Paris, and if chosen among the four or five women to race on February 2 with Team USA, it would be her first Nations Cup event.
“This trip is also my first experience on a 250m track, which I’m very excited for. It’s much steeper than what we train on in Colorado Springs,” Faulkner admitted. “I've been to some track camps to try and work on my sprint and kind of build that up in power and also some technical skills. Yeah, I'm also trying out for the team, but we'll just kind of see how that goes.”
Positive team environment
Her main quest for 2024 is to make the US team for the Paris Olympic Games, but on the road for the time trial. She also wants to develop into a GC rider with her new squad, and she’s already amped up to be part of the programme, from people to provisions.
“I think they're really genuine in their effort to try and make the men’s team and women's team as equal as possible. Just things like we stayed at the same hotel, we went on rides together, we [women] also get nutrition at home,” she explained about being part of EF Education-Cannondale.
“Just like the men, we get a lot of the same resources. First, it’s the access to those resources. The second thing is just how it makes you feel, you're treated like a professional, you feel that you're valued, you feel that they want you there. And that has such a tremendous impact emotionally on how I'm going to perform. I think that can't be overstated enough.
“I'm really excited about the people. I really like Ezra, I have a lot of faith in her ability to manage a team. And I'm just really excited about my teammates. They're really incredible cyclists and many of them are so interesting outside of cycling, they're smart.they're all very ambitious. And so I think that fosters a sense of trust and rapport off the bike as well,” continued the Harvard University graduate.
“We've all won races before, but we're all very different kinds of riders. And so we can really complement each other on the bike. We're similar enough that we can support each other in different races. We're also different enough that I think we'll all have our opportunities to really try and win different races and I think that's a really awesome thing when you're building out a team to have that well-roundedness.”
From Australia, she heads to Europe to begin her road season with EF Education-Cannondale at Setmana Valenciana, February 15-18, then a return to Strade Bianche (March 2) and some of the Classics, of which she said a start at Milan- San Remo “would be fun”.
“We're still trying to figure out what my calendar looks like for the year, a lot of it will depend on whether I do or don't make the Olympic team and what the run up for that is. I’m trying not to peak too early in the Classics season. Right now, keep the big picture in mind. I'm kind of trying to get through US Nationals and then we'll kind of decide from there what the next steps are.”
Faulkner continues to lean on her life experiences for each new career leap, where she learned entrepreneurship from her family in Alaska and struck out on her own to become a venture capitalist in New York.
“I think in my life, I've become really comfortable with failure, because I know that it's the only way to win. You miss 100% of the shots you don't take, yes? I don't expect to win every time I break away, I don't expect to make it every time I attack. But I know that the only way I will win or stay away is if I try.
“I was an investor before cycling, where we invested in early-stage companies and there's a very high failure rate in those companies. But when you did make an investment, it could return the entire fund. And so it was just kind of high-risk, high-reward type of investing that I was familiar with. So when I go to attack, I kind of have the same mentality, which is there's a very high chance of failure. But the one time it works, it works brilliantly.”
