Navigating twists and turns, Alaska cyclist Kristen Faulkner reaches the Olympics with a key decision left to make

Kristen Faulkner’s road to the 2024 Paris Olympics has been full of twists and turns.

The cyclist who grew up in Homer has navigated them all like an expert rider on an unpredictable course.

Faulkner will be part of Team USA when the Olympic Games kick off this week. But her precise competition schedule is still up in the air.

In June, Faulkner was named a member of Team USA’s track cycling team, despite spending a great majority of her career competing as a road cyclist.

{Alaska’s Kristen Faulkner lands spot on U.S. Olympic track cycling team]

Then earlier this month, Faulkner was named a member of Team USA’s road cycling team after Taylor Knibb, who had earned an automatic qualifying spot, dropped out to focus on the triathlon.

That opened up the possibility of Faulkner racing in both events. It’s a role she said she’d like to assume is viable.

“Road (racing) is my primary career,” she said. “It’s what I’ve been dreaming about for a much longer time period. It’s racing against my peer group and so it feels a bit more of a kind of long-standing dream. That would be really exciting for me to do.

“The track is really exciting because I think we have a really strong team and have a really strong shot at bringing home a medal. For me, being part of a team effort feels — I think it would be a bit more rewarding if we all came together and performed really well than doing something like the road, where it feels a bit more individual.”

But the women’s road race is Aug. 4, and the qualifying for the pursuit on the track team starts on Aug. 6.

In a message to the Daily News earlier this week, Faulkner said she is still deciding whether to participate in both events and may opt to focus all of her energy on competing for the track team. It’s a choice that Faulkner said is hers alone and not dictated by coaches or USA Cycling.

“That decision will be made in the final days leading up to the road race,” she wrote.

The women’s road race is Sunday, Aug. 4 at 4 a.m. Alaska time. The women’s pursuit qualifying is Aug. 6 at 7:30 a.m. Alaska time. On Aug. 7, the first round starts at 3:52 a.m. and the finals are at 8:57 a.m. All races are available on Peacock and nbcolympics.com.

Over the last couple years, Faulkner’s cycling career has taken her in some unexpected directions.

In her second season racing in Europe in 2022, she started to find success. She earned multiple podiums in stage races, and it was also her first exposure to track racing.

Faulkner attended a track camp in fall 2022 and a talent ID camp for prospective Olympic riders in fall 2023. Team USA already had three riders who had earned a medal in Tokyo, and was looking for a fourth and fifth rider to round out the team.

Track cycling is distinctly different from road racing in many ways. The bikes have no brakes and no gears, and riders must be expert at handling the bike.

“You’re in arrow position and you have to follow this black line perfectly when there’s an incredible amount of G force pushed against you,” Faulkner said. “You have to do it all at 36 miles an hour with no brakes and then find the person in front of you.”

Faulkner said she joined the camps with a two-pronged goal. There was the potential to qualify as an Olympian, and she also thought the camps could improve her road racing.

“This has been my most successful season on the road,” she said. “A lot of my last-minute attacks and short bursts of power are definitely all better because of the track. Even my sprint power, which allows me to attack and get away.”

She continued to train last winter with the track team in Colorado and eventually joined the team for a competition in Australia.

Despite the progress she made on the track, Faulkner was still trying to qualify as one of Team USA’s representatives on the road cycling team.

She competed for an automatic spot on the team at the 2024 USA Cycling Time Trial National Championships, but the race and berth on the team was won by Knibb. Faulkner credited Knibb, but said the criteria for qualifying was frustrating.

“I was disappointed in the selection criteria that went into it,” she said. “If their selection criteria had taken in a broader scope of work and they’d accounted for things like mechanical failures or equipment differences among teams and the requirements, it could have been a very different outcome.”

But Knibb, a triathlete who competed in Tokyo, recently made the decision to focus on that event — leaving the door open for Faulkner’s addition to the team.

While she had initially hoped to compete in both cycling events, competing in both so close together might diminish her ability to be successful throughout both races.

Olympic success is something that has been a key area of interest for Faulkner going back decades.

Faulkner, 31, was still in grade school when the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney captured her imagination and sparked her dream of becoming an Olympian.

Sports were already “central to my life,” Faulkner said, and her siblings told her the Olympics were the place where all the greatest athletes in the world congregated. She was already a fairly serious youth swimmer, and record-breaking Olympian Michael Phelps immediately caught her attention.

“We watched all the swimming events and we watched Michael Phelps,” she said. “He was in his prime at that time. Being a swimmer and then seeing Michael Phelps go and sweep some gold medals and have so much success, that was really special to me. I was like, ‘Wow, I want to be like that one day.’ ”

Faulkner continued to compete and was a successful high school swimmer. She was on the rowing team at Harvard, but in the back of her head she still had those Olympic ambitions. While working for a venture capital firm in New York City in 2017, she took an introductory bike course for women.

Three years later, she was riding professionally.

“If I don’t pursue this now, I’m never going to pursue it,” she said. “And so that was like, this big a-ha moment for me, and so I left my job and I decided to pursue it full time.”

It wasn’t only Phelps’ performance at the Olympics that allowed Faulkner to dream big. Her family watched the gymnastics competition and track and field, and Faulkner said it was the first time she remembers seeing female athletes on TV.

“It really struck a chord with me,” she said. “The entire rest of the year, I didn’t identify with anything else sports-related on TV. It was the first time in my life I turned on the TV and thought, ‘That could be me.’ ”