The normal lifecycle of a star athlete goes something like this. Over the span of several years they work hard at honing their craft, getting better and stronger with each passing season. At some point, they reach their peak, achieving the world-beating feats many expected of them. If they’re lucky, that peak might even last years.
Eventually, though, their star starts to fade and retirement starts to beckon. Usually they’ll leave the sport as a shade of their former world-beating self.
Grace Brown’s trajectory is a little different. A late starter to cycling, she joined the pro ranks in 2019 as a 26-year-old, and has improved steadily every year since. This past Saturday she won an Olympic gold medal in the individual time trial – the biggest result of her career in the biggest season of her career. And yet, at the height of her powers, with an Olympic medal around her neck, Brown is just three months from retirement – a milestone she is welcoming with open arms.
And while Brown’s final season is still far from over, it’s hard not to see her Olympic time trial as the culmination of everything she’s worked for in her sporting career. And not just in cycling.
Like many young athletes, Brown hoped she might one day make it to the Olympics. In those early years, it was middle-distance running that seemed her best avenue – Brown was a competitive runner at the national level. But after a string of debilitating injuries – stress fractures in her tibias and the head of her femur – she started looking for a different endurance sport. In 2015, she picked up cycling and joined the St. Kilda Cycling Club in Melbourne.
Within two years she was racing for the Australian national team in Europe and by 2019 she had signed with Mitchelton-Scott (now Liv AlUla Jayco) to become a full-time professional in Europe, racing at the highest level of the sport.
In the years that followed, Brown established herself both as a strong time-trialist and as a rider whose late-race solo attacks demanded respect. Second in the 2020 Liège-Bastogne-Liège (behind former world champ Lizzie Deignan) showcased her considerable talent, confirmed three days later with her first European victory – Brabantse Pijl, won solo.
In March 2021, another late solo move netted her first WorldTour win – Brugge-De Panne – and a stage win at the Vuelta a Burgos followed a few months later. 2021 also brought a fourth-place finish in the time trial at the COVID-delayed Tokyo Olympics, just seven agonising seconds outside the medals.
In 2022 Brown was again second at Liège (this time behind another world champ, Annemiek van Vleuten, at the peak of her powers) and took a stage win at the Women’s Tour. A time trial victory at the Commonwealth Games followed, as did another WorldTour stage win at the Vuelta. But it was second place in the Wollongong Road Worlds time trial, on home soil, that proved to be an inflection point – confirmation that Brown wasn’t just a great escape artist; she was legitimately among the world’s best time-trialists.
A handful of victories followed in 2023 – including overall success at the Tour Down Under – as did another runner-up finish in the Worlds time trial, this one in Glasgow. But it’s her 2024 season that will be regarded as Brown’s best-ever.
Leaving aside her fourth Australian ITT title in January, Brown’s year started in frustrating fashion. As she told Escape earlier this year, the Classics campaign she had targeted passed by almost entirely without joy. But then Liège-Bastogne-Liège happened.
After getting into the early move that day in late April, Brown was still in the mix when the favourites came to the front. And despite overshooting a corner late and dropping from the lead group, Brown fought back before outsprinting her more-fancied rivals to take victory after two runner-up finishes. It was the biggest win of her career … until this past Saturday.
Brown had long been aiming for the Paris time trial; probably since coming so close to a medal in Tokyo three years earlier. And when she rolled down the start ramp in Paris on Saturday – haltingly, with a brief, concerning wobble – she did so as the second-last rider to start, one of the big favourites.
On a day where steady rain turned the Parisian circuit into an ice rink, leading many riders to crash – not least reigning world champ Chloe Dygert and Lotte Kopecky – Brown tamed the course like a lifelong bike racer, not one who’d only turned to the sport less than a decade earlier. In truth, she likely could have afforded a crash or two and still won, such was her eventual margin of victory (1:31 over Great Britain’s Anna Henderson, with the US’s Dygert two seconds further back). The fact that her husband Elliot and her parents Tony and Ruth were on hand to witness Brown’s victory made it all the sweeter.
Brown’s win wasn’t just an emphatic statement of dominance; it was also precisely what she had in mind when, in her June retirement announcement video, she said she wanted to “sign off in style”. She did precisely that, becoming Australia’s first gold medalist of the 2024 Olympic Games, and the first Australian ever to win an Olympic time trial.
While Brown’s Olympic gold is her crowning glory, her final season isn’t over yet. This Sunday she’ll again don the green and gold in the Olympic road race. There, she’ll be part of a plucky squad of Aussie underdogs, alongside fellow Victorians Ruby Roseman-Gannon and Lauretta Hanson, in a race that most expect to be dominated by the European powerhouses of Belgium and the Netherlands.
While the time trial was Brown’s biggest chance of a medal, she told Escape earlier this year that she wants to play a role in the road race too. After Saturday’s result, she can now do that without any pressure or expectation. She’s already more than delivered, for herself and indeed for her nation.
Big targets remain beyond the Olympics too. A return to the Tour de France Femmes in August seems probable. And then her attention will turn to Zürich, Switzerland, where she’ll be hoping her Liège win after two runner-up finishes is a good omen for the Road Worlds ITT. If Olympic gold is the ultimate culmination to her short but successful career, then winning Worlds would be a most delectable cherry on top.
Should Brown win Worlds, she might never get to wear the rainbow bands in competition, a fact that would persuade many in her position to reconsider their decision to retire. But if Brown’s response to winning Olympic gold is any indication, the 32-year-old has made up her mind. She’s said repeatedly that the burden of being away from friends and family for so much of the year is getting increasingly difficult. She just wants to go home to Australia, to be with her husband Elliot, to be with her family. She’s even “got a few plans in the works” once the dust settles on her racing career.
In short: she’s more than fine with the idea of her career coming to an end, even if she could certainly keep racing for many years to come, and even if she would likely win many more races.
“I can be really proud to go out on such a high,” she said after taking gold on Saturday. “I know that I’ve come here and given it everything and it’s paid off. I can finish my career really satisfied.”
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