Kristen Faulkner Quit Finance for Cycling. Then She Won Gold.
Despite winning two Olympic gold medals this summer, Kristen Faulkner says her reputation will probably always be “Harvard grad who quit a successful career in venture capital for the race track.” Unlike her competitors, most of whom began riding in their teens or earlier, Faulkner got her start in the sport after college. What began as a way to work out for free in Central Park quickly turned into a passion for Faulkner, who then opted to leave the security of Silicon Valley in 2021 to train in Europe. “I never regretted it,” she tells me. “But a lot of my VC peers, my family, my friends, were like, ‘Is she having a quarter-life crisis?’”
No one in Faulkner’s family had been a professional athlete, and none of her cycling teammates had made the transition to full-time sports so late in life, either. There were times in her training when Faulkner felt isolated and unable to relate to anyone around her. She watched friends in the venture-capital world get promotions, score new deals, and move forward along the career path she’d once pursued. There were times she wondered if she’d done the right thing, but she was vindicated when she became the first U.S. woman to win a Road Race Olympic medal in 40 years, also taking home the women’s track cycling team pursuit gold in Paris. Just a few weeks later, she also was the highest-placing American rider in the Tour de France Femmes. Not one to slack, Faulkner is currently writing a book and pursuing a master’s degree in nutrition “as a hobby.” Faulkner lives and trains in Girona, Spain; here’s how she gets it done.
On her daily routine:
I’m very much an early riser. I normally wake up around 6 or 6:30 a.m. I’ll do some light stretching and then I make my coffee and have some breakfast. I like to have oatmeal, or kefir, or eggs on toast. Then I usually make my route on Strava for the day, figure out my workout, and get ready to ride around 10 a.m. I go riding for, on average, maybe three hours, come back, have a big lunch that’s high carb plus a protein shake. In the afternoon, I’ll do admin, like study the course for an upcoming race or write some of my book. Then I try to have pretty quiet evenings and go to bed early. I’ll try to get in an hour of reading every day and keep my evenings free from devices so I can go to bed between 9 and 10 p.m. But most of my days are not typical; often I’m traveling and racing.
On her first career choice:
It wasn’t anything to do with finance that drew me. I think entrepreneurs are the smartest, most passionate people, and to go to work every day and interact with people who geek out on the most obscure topics and can always teach you something — I love that. I felt like there was this huge gender gap in VC, and a lot of women weren’t getting funding because a lot of men didn’t understand their businesses, or maybe there were some implicit biases. I really wanted to change that. I wanted to be an advocate for female entrepreneurs. I thought of working for a startup after college, but I felt that if I went into VC, I might be able to have a greater impact on the landscape.
On leaving venture capital for cycling:
My big thing before leaving my job was that I wanted to have a year of savings so I’d be able to support myself. If I didn’t get a contract after my first year, then I would reevaluate. I’d been living super-frugally for my first four years after college. I was in New York, but I rarely went out to eat, I didn’t drink a lot, and I always had cheap apartments. In my first year cycling, I only made $7,000 with my former team. I was like, Okay, I can’t live off of that, so I stayed working. The other thing that was important to me was that I wanted to have credibility in the VC field so that if I ever went back to it, I would be able to say, “Here’s my résumé, here’s why I’m employable.” That would have been really hard after just one or two years of working. The next year I got $25,000, and that plus my savings kept me afloat until I got my contract. I was like, Okay, I can be good at this. I have enough financial savings, and I have a résumé to point to.
On her transferable skills:
I’ve always been willing to take risks. I don’t know if I went into VC because of that, or if I learned that from VC. But I’m an attacking kind of rider — I like to go out solo — and when you do that, the majority of times, you get caught behind other riders and you don’t succeed. But when you do succeed, you win. That’s a very similar mentality to VC. A lot of the companies you invest in don’t make it, but when they do, they bring home the whole fund.
I think a lot of cyclists — I don’t want to say it, but maybe especially girls — are more afraid to put themselves out there, on TV, in front of everyone, and then get caught. The other thing is, in VC I was always in a room with people who were smarter than me. So I was totally okay asking a lot of questions. Because I started cycling so late, I had so much to learn and I was never embarrassed to admit how little I knew. Like, I made flashcards of all the riders. I was super-analytical about it. People joke about the flashcards, but it helped!
On top of that, VC is a very male-dominated industry, and cycling is also a male-dominated sport. I was more comfortable asserting myself in front of a group of older, more experienced men who were telling me that I didn’t know what I was talking about than women who’d grown up in the industry and had this mentality of ‘Oh, this is just how it’s always been.’ I think that, in some ways, VC helped me learn to stand up for myself in different situations.
On gender inequality in cycling:
I think the biggest driver of women’s performance in the sport is that salaries have gone up. In the past, very few women could make a living off of the sport. They kind of scraped by and then by the time they’re in their early 30s, if they wanted to start a family or have a life, it was like, Okay, I need to go get a real job now. I think the best male cyclist makes $7 million a year. That’s without endorsement deals. The top woman maybe makes a few hundred thousand, but most women are making between $60,000 and $80,000 a year, whereas an equivalent man might make like $300,000 to $500,000. A lot of teams will say, “Our minimum wage for men and women is the same.” But all the women are at minimum wage and none of the men are. Another thing is prize money. For the exact same race and organizers, the men’s prize money might be $50,000, while the women’s might be $5,000. The team will have a separate dinner buffet with a chef and all this nice food for the men, while on the other side of the dining room the women’s dinner table will be way lower quality. It’s so in your face and you feel like a second-class citizen. So my goal in my cycling career is to see greater equality before I leave. The last few years there’s been a lot of growth for women, but I don’t want that to obscure the fact that we have so much farther to go.
On balancing a social life with training:
It’s difficult. Rather than seeing people every weekend, it’s more like I have three months in the off-season when I spend a lot of quality time with my American family and friends. Then when I’m in Europe, it’s between race blocks where maybe I go out to coffee, go out to lunch. I talk to my friends a lot on the phone. A lot of my biking friends from America come to Girona every year, so I see them that way. And my boyfriend is moving to be with me in January. I’m super-excited. We’ve been long distance for almost two years.
On not letting age stop her from cycling:
When I started cycling, I wasn’t thinking about doing it for ten years. I was thinking about doing it for one, maybe two, and then reevaluating. But we’re seeing women who can really be competitive up until they’re 40. I don’t see a reason to stop cycling unless I don’t enjoy it anymore. I want to make it through the L.A. Olympics and then potentially longer than that. I’ll be 35 in 2028. At that point, if I keep getting better and I’m enjoying it, I’m not going to stop. Women’s sports is changing a lot. You have maternity leave, and you have women who are still winning World Championships when they’re almost 40 years old. Cycling is very demanding, but it’s also a sport that is highly tactical and not purely about your physical abilities. Even if you lose some physical fitness between 35 and 40, you gain so much tactical skill that it kind of nets out.
On the advice she would give her younger self:
Just don’t care what other people think. In a lot of ways, I didn’t — other people’s opinions never changed my behavior — but it did sometimes make me feel bad about myself. There’s always going to be people who don’t understand. Trust your gut and don’t listen to other people who don’t know what they’re talking about.