Hello and thank you for reading this week’s Wheel Talk Newsletter! By now I hope you all have seen the women’s road race from the Paris Olympics. It was incredible, the top names in the sport came with their best, some fell far short of expectations while some rose to the occasion. Teams that threw everything they had at the race and were in a perfect position walked away with nothing, and a rider who wasn’t even going to be there a few weeks ago netted a historic gold medal.
Wheel Talk
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The future is bright for Coryn Labecki.
The first time I remember racing against Coryn was at the Collegiate National Championships in Ogden, Utah in 2013. I was fresh on the scene, while Coryn had already won too many national titles to count across multiple disciplines. The course included a bunch of flat and then a big climb into a descent and a bit of flat to the finish. On the climb, Coryn rode away, rode away like Katie Hall, Katie Antonneau (now Keough) and I were standing still. We didn’t see her until the finish.
Almost two years later we were teammates at UnitedHealthcare and by the time I got to officially meet her at team camp, I knew the legends around her. Wicked fast in a sprint, tactically deadly, and incredibly focused. Cut you to the bone focused. I was pleased to find she also had a great sense of humour.
I had the absolute joy of being teammates with Coryn for two years before she made the jump to Europe to ride for Sunweb where she became the only American rider (men or women) to win the Tour of Flanders.
On Tuesday, July 30th Coryn quietly retired from cycling. Her teammate posted a now-deleted photo after the race and a few hours later her current team EF-Oatly-Cannondale confirmed the news with an Instagram reel celebrating the American rider.
Knowing Coryn, she is going to tackle retirement with the same determination that carried her through her incredibly successful career. She was one of the few American women who left their families behind to race full-time in Europe, something she did for seven years. And family is incredibly important to Coryn.
As she gets ready to make the jump into a new life, all I can say is it was an honour to be her teammate, and to watch her race all these years. Coryn was always an inspiration to me, to all the teammates she had throughout her career, and to many many young women (and men) watching at home.
Racing continues…
At the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift!(!!!)
The Basics:
From Monday, August 12 to Sunday, August 1
Live coverage: 🇺🇸 Peacock/NBC, 🇬🇧 🇪🇺 Eurosport/Discovery+ 🇳🇿 SBS, 🇨🇦 FloBikes
More previews to come on Escape Collective!
Wheel Talk Podcast
This week Gracie, Loren and I broke down all the action from the Olympic road race in Paris! All I can say is: woah.
Let’s Discuss
Kristen Faulkner’s road to Paris.
Faulkner’s win in Paris was amazing not only because of who she beat to get that gold medal and how she did it but also because of the pre-race controversy that went on long before the race.
By now, if you’ve been reading this newsletter for a few months, you’ll know that the USA had a time with their Olympic selection. It wasn’t until the last minute that Faulkner was tapped to race the road race at all. But you may not know that her Olympic story started well before Paris.
Faulkner only started racing in Europe in 2020; prior to that her first notable road race was the five-stage Cascade Classic in Oregon in 2019. By 2020 she was picked up by Tibco-SVB and brought to Europe for a handful of races. By 2021 she was gathering top results, the biggest of which was a stage win at the WT Ladies Tour of Norway.
That win came after the Toyko Olympics, which is significant for this topic.
Prior to the Tour of Norway, her top result in Europe was seventh at Gent-Wevelgem that spring. The USA made their Olympic selection a few months later, and Faulkner wasn’t picked to represent in Tokyo.
After the selection was made Faulkner started the process of arbitrating for one of the four spots the USA had earned for the Tokyo road race. She eventually withdrew her legal challenge but made her intent clear. The Olympics were her goal, even with only one year of racing at the highest level under her belt.
Three years and a whole lot of drama later, Faulkner posed in front of the Eiffel Tower with her gold medal, proving not only to USA Cycling but the world that she deserved the spot that was almost denied to her in Paris.
The win is massive for the American, especially because USA Cycling tends to favour the time trial over the road race in its Olympic selection criteria. For years, they have leaned into the race against the clock as a more controllable event, one that they have a better chance of winning. It worked for years, with Kristen Armstrong, and it may have worked with Dygert this year if Brown hadn’t been on an absolute tear. Now, they will walk away from Paris having put the vast majority of their resources into the time trial (for both the men and women) with only a bronze in that event, but with a gold medal in the road race.
Because of those factors, the medal earned by Faulkner is hers alone. Cycling is a team sport, more than just the literal team in the race there are so many people each athlete has in their own personal team, and it’s Faulkner’s personal team that helped get her there. When it came to the two USA riders in the road race, there was very little cohesion. But Faulkner didn’t need Dygert’s support to get to that top step.
Faulkner was on another level on Sunday. The strongest rider in the race, a position she had been in before, but she also rode with the determination of an athlete with many more years of experience than she has. Four years. Four years in the WorldTour peloton was all it took to hone Faulkner’s skills enough to become Olympic champion. This was no win of confusion, with riders unclear about a solo woman still off the front from the early breakaway, no. The top riders in the race watched Faulkner ride away and did nothing.
All the factors that led to Faulkner’s win, the four years from when she first lined up at Tour Feminin l’Ardeche to when she crossed under the Eiffel Tower; it’s enough to inspire just about anyone, and isn’t that what the Olympics are all about?
A picture worth a couple of words
A lot of people watching would have been more than happy to see Marianne Vos grace the top step of Sunday’s podium. Vos won her own gold medal 12 years ago at the Games in London, and even if she didn’t win another in Paris, it’s pretty dang cool that after 12 years, and many setbacks, she was still able to ride to second on the day.
Taylor Swift
Faulkner to USA Cycling, probably.
Until next time!
Some final notes before we wrap this up.
One: Please read Matt de Neef’s piece on the finale of the Olympic road race.
Two: We are finally getting some (official) transfer news!!
On Tuesday we learned that FDJ-Suez signed Juliette Labous for the 2025 season with a fancy little video. The Frenchwoman will leave DSM Firmenich-PostNL after EIGHT years. She first signed for the team in 2017 at the age of 17 and has obviously spent many years developing with the Dutch team. Now she will take everything she learned over to FDJ-Suez and will be yet another cog in the machine they are building to win the Tour de France Femmes.
DSM Firmenich-PostNL will not be without a GC hopeful. The Dutch team will be getting Marta Cavalli from FDJ-Suez. Cavalli is an incredible climber, winner of the Amstel Gold Race and La Fleche Wallonne in 2022, but has been struggling to return to top form after multiple crashes both in and out of races. The move to a new team will hopefully be a good one for the Italian, who is only 26 years old and hopefully has plenty of racing left in her career.
This time next week we will be one stage into the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift and Loren, Tilda Price and I will be on the ground for Escape Collective! I can’t wait to be on my second Tour, last year was a lifetime highlight, and I’m sure this year will be just as good if not better. There will be loads of riders, both those who made their Olympic teams and left Paris disappointed and those who weren’t even selected with a point to prove at the Tour, which is great news for us.
See you next week! And make sure to subscribe to the Wheel Talk Podcast for daily episodes from the race!
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