Kristen Faulkner ’16 won two gold medals in Road and Track Cycling at the 2024 Paris Olympics, contributing to Harvard’s 13 total medals at this year’s games. She is an impressive athlete with stage wins at the Giro d’Italia, the Vuelta D’Espagne, and a PanAm Championship gold medal—already decorating her athletic resume before this Olympics. What makes Faulkner’s story unique and inspiring is that she has not been on the road to cycling glory since her days in Cambridge: Faulkner was on the Women’s Varsity Lightweight Rowing team at Harvard and had never cycled until 2017.
Upon graduating in 2016, like many Harvard student-athletes, Faulkner walked away from competitive sports and gravitated toward a familiar route of working in venture capital. According to the annual senior survey done by The Harvard Crimson, of the graduating Class of 2024, 16% of them will pursue finance, and of this cohort, 64% of them will be doing this in New York. Similarly, in Faulkner’s graduation year, over 17% indicated they would be working in finance. Understandably, Harvard alumni are drawn to the fast-paced lifestyle of a finance career in the city and the above-average compensation that comes with it.
In an interview with the Independent, Faulkner said that in 2016, venture capital was not as highly regarded as it is today, but she decided to pursue it anyway. She thought, “I probably need some work experience so I could go be a software engineer for a few years…or I could go work in venture capital where I would learn what makes a good business.” She landed a job at Bessemer Venture Partners in New York City and later moved to Silicon Valley to work at Threshold Ventures. During her time at Harvard, she concentrated in Computer Science and interned at Bridgewater.
As a young kid growing up in the small town of Homer, Alaska, Faulkner learned the value of hard work at her parents’ hotel and restaurant and wanted to grow up to make a name for herself. All these values curated her Olympic dream from a young age. Having been a rower at Harvard and competed in varsity running, swimming, and rowing in high school at Andover Academy, Faulkner has always known how to push her limits in endurance sports. She even won a silver medal for Team USA at the U23 World Championships for rowing while at Harvard.
After graduating, Faulkner walked away from rowing. “I knew I would do some sort of type A, post-college sport,” she said, but it was not always her plan to become a cyclist. Faulkner did not give up on her Olympic dreams post-grad. “I just really had this dream to go to the Olympics one day. I had thought about going for rowing but the timing of it didn’t work out… When I moved to New York, I wasn’t ready to let the Olympic dream go. I wanted to stay fit, I thought maybe after two years I would go back and train for rowing. I knew that my sports career wasn’t over.”
While working in New York, she found herself missing a team sport and looking for an athletic outlet. In 2017, she joined a beginner cycling clinic in Central Park. She later signed up for a race and ultimately found her passion for cycling. In 2018, Faulkner moved to Silicon Valley for a new job opportunity, which also gave her access to better cycling. In 2020, she did a race block in Europe while working remotely. “This was the hardest month and a half of my life… It was like the hardest week in my life as a student-athlete at Harvard, doubled. I had to go through that experience to realize it wasn’t possible to do both at the same time, but I also had to go through that to realize I had a chance at making it at cycling because up until then, I had no results in Europe.” Soon after this, Faulkner left her job in Silicon Valley to become a full-time professional cyclist.
Faulkner is currently a rider for Team EF-Oatly-Cannondale, the only American-owned and operated team in pro cycling. She lives in Girona, Spain, where the training and equipment facility for Team EF-Oatly-Cannondale is. She trains year-round for the professional cycling circuit, where all the races are in Europe. To North Americans, cycling is a niche sport; however, the 2023 Tour de France Femmes garnered a live audience of about 2.9 million on each of the seven days of stage racing. In comparison, the 2023 WNBA finals had an estimated 800,000 spectators.
However, the financial barriers to becoming a professional athlete in any sport still existed for Faulkner. “It was really scary, to be honest, I have always been really frugal with my money. I was always saving because I had this idea in my head that if I wanted to be a professional athlete then I was going to have to save as much money as possible.” Many Harvard students and graduates get caught up in the rat race of becoming the most successful on paper, but Faulkner was comfortable with the thought of being financially stable.“I didn’t feel like I needed to be rich. I had to support myself financially; my parents weren’t going to support me financially to go be a cyclist.”
Harvard is not known for having many graduates who become professional athletes. Academics are, understandably, the priority at this institution, even for student-athletes, which leads to graduates’ vocational outcomes being relatively conventional. Faulkner had to have immense trust in herself to make the jump to being a full-time athlete, as she knew she would perhaps spend a few years struggling to make ends meet. “It was really hard to leave a lucrative six-figure job to make—I think my first year I got a seven thousand dollar stipend from my team. It wasn’t even a salary,” she said.
“I can be great at either one of these but I can’t be great at both at the same time,” Faulkner realized. “I decided I had to make a choice, and I decided venture capital would always be there, but the sports and the Olympic journey would not.” Another mental hurdle in Faulkner’s path was the fact that it was impossible to know whether she would succeed in cycling, so she knew she had to commit to trying full-time. “I had a roommate in college who said something to me that really stuck with me. ‘Doors will open up in the areas that you pursue.’ If you’re talented and hard-working, doors will open up for you, you just have to pursue that thing.”
“It’s really funny because I think there’s a public image that Harvard kids are arrogant, but I really don’t think that’s true. I think when you’re surrounded by other people who are so talented you start to feel a little insecure about yourself and question, ‘Can I actually be successful as an athlete?’ ‘Can I actually be successful as a musician or writer?’” The path to Olympic gold could be as simple as trusting yourself, dreaming big, and putting in a lot of hard work. “I want to tell Harvard kids to have more confidence.”
Finding success as a college graduate is often defined by how much money you make right out of school, leaving dreams behind in the pursuit of becoming financially successful. “I think Harvard kids underestimate themselves, to be honest,” said Faulkner. Her story exemplifies the idea that however niche an avenue may be, if you work hard and commit yourself to it, you can find success. Faulkner’s story is inspirational, demonstrating how the utmost success can be found by breaking the mold of what Harvard graduates do with their degree, and how there is no one way to Olympic Glory.
You can follow Faulkner’s journey on her Instagram, @arcticfaulks, or her website https://www.kristenfaulkner.com/.
Breagh Bridge ’27 (breaghbridge@college.harvard.edu) did not do very well in her Tour de France Fantasy League.