Chloe Dygert entered the Paris Olympic Games women’s road race with a bronze medal from the individual time trial a week ago. Her primary focus was the Team Pursuit event starting Wednesday. However, Dygert and her teammate Kirsten Faulkner, being racers at heart, seized the opportunity when they found themselves in a reduced peloton during the final laps in Paris.
For the second time at these Games, Dygert encountered chaos in the form of a crash. She had already fallen hard in the rain during the time trial, finishing just one second behind silver medallist Anna Henderson of Great Britain and settling for bronze. This time, she slid out on a dry corner in a crucial moment of the race. Fortunately, teammate Faulkner took the lead and secured the gold.
“Any time Team USA is on the top step, that’s awesome. I’m really happy for her — first Olympics, first gold medal. That’s amazing,” Dygert told Cyclingnews and other media after Faulkner’s victory. “She’s been having a great year. She’s just shown over and over again that she has that power for those finals.”
‘A little bumpy’
The crash happened as the Côte de la Butte Montmartre ascent approached for the first time with 48km to go. The last two survivors of the breakaway, Fariba Hashimi and Hannah Tserakh, were within sight of the group containing the race favourites. A touch of wheels on the inside of a right-hand corner of the narrow, cobbled section led to Dygert’s fall. Elise Chabbey of Switzerland also went down when Dygert’s crash hit her back wheel.
“I watched a video of it [the crash] when I came across the line and it looked like I had the inside line and the girl next to me just kind of got pinched and nicked my bars,” Dygert explained. “Just unlucky there, and we both went down, so kind of a bummer.”
The crash caused a delay as riders tried to navigate around the two fallen riders, including favourites Lotte Kopecky and Dutch riders Demi Vollering and Lorena Wiebes. Faulkner, near the front, avoided the crash and pushed on from that position. Despite various configurations and attacks from the small lead group, Faulkner emerged victorious, holding off the pursuit behind.
Photo Credit: Ed Sykes/SWpix.comRecovery mode
Dygert rode hard to rejoin the race after her fall. “Such a bummer. There’s nothing I can do at that point, just to get back on the bike and keep my head on, and try to go as fast as possible. But once I got back up, there was no point of working,” Dygert said. After working back to the chase group, she saw Wiebes close by and decided to pull back, not wanting to help the Dutch rider bridge to the front.
“You know, at that point, I knew Faulkner was up the road,” Dygert said. “So there was really no point of me, once I got in the Wiebes group, to continue to attack. I knew if Wiebes comes to the line, Wiebes is winning.”
Dygert, eyeing her first gold on the track, heads next to the Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines velodrome for Team Pursuit. She will join Lily Williams, Olivia Cummins, and Tokyo Omnium gold medallist Jen Valente. Dygert hoped her injuries from the fall were superficial, saying the aches felt ‘a little bumpy’.
“We’re gonna see if my shin needs some stitches or not. Just go into recovery mode now,” she said. “At the end of the day, I have really good fitness coming out of that, knowing that my fitness is there to be able to chase back like I did. So I’m pretty happy with that.”
Main photo credit: Getty
