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Devoid of her gold bike and without any luck on her side, Kristen Faulkner appears to be cursed during the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift.
It was touch and go whether or not the reigning Olympic and American road race champion would begin the race last Saturday. After being so unwell in the preceding 10 days, she could barely turn her pedals in training. But the EF Education-Oatly 32-year-old did take to the startline in Vannes.
Things, however, have not been on an upward trajectory since then. Faulkner crashed on stage 2, breaking her customized Cannondale, and only just made the time cut.
Then on stage 4 she fell 6 kilometers from the line, returning to her team’s bus with cuts and grazes all down her left side. Only one rider, Canadian Kiara Lylyk, is below her in the general classification.
“I was super, super sick the week before [the race] and the day before we weren’t sure if I was going to start because I was feeling so ill,” she told Velo at the start of stage 4.
“It was severe fatigue, electrolyte imbalance — a lot of things adding up. I was so weak that I couldn’t even ride 100 watts for 10 days.”
Reflecting on her stage 2 fall, she said: “I was starting to turn the corner the day before so we decided to give it a shot and see what happens. The hope was that I’d have an easy first few days.
“But I was riding along, mid-pack, on a descent, and the road split at one point. There was a curb in the middle of the road, some girl hit it and flew off her bike and into me, and then I flew into the bushes.
“I was pretty rattled from the fall and it was pretty hard on the body when I’m already feeling pretty tired. It took me a little while to get back on my bike.”
Making sure she crossed the line in time became a concern as the race wore on. “I just didn’t have the strength to chase back in the first 10 minutes, and by the time I had the strength to push on, the peloton was gone and at that point it was just about making the time cut,” she said.
The Olympic champion has had two falls in four days.
“I was not riding full gas and was trying to conserve as much energy as I could, but then in the last 5 kilometers I had to go pretty hard.”
Just as painful for Faulkner was that her bike snapped in half as a result of her fall. “My heart aches as well as my body,” she laughed. “I’ll have to come up with some really cool social media ideas and then they [Cannondale] might paint me a gold bike again!”
Faulkner refused to speak with the media after her latest fall on stage 4, but didn’t appear to be suffering from anything more severe than minor abrasions.
At the start of the day, however, she conceded she was not in stage-winning form. Her duty will be protecting her EF team leader Cédrine Kerbaol as well as she can.
“I’m doing better every day and I think I am riding my way into this Tour,” Faulkner said. “I don’t think I’ll be in a position to try to win stages, but I feel like I’m in a position where I can help my team a lot, and that’s what I plan to do in the next week.”