Faulkner wins 2 gold medals in Pan American races
Published 4:30 pm Thursday, March 12, 2026
Homer’s Kristen Faulkner, a professional cyclist and two-time Olympic gold medalist, won two more gold medals last month during the Pan American Cycling Championships held in Santiago, Chile.
Faulkner said in an interview Monday that in order to qualify to race in the annual Pan Am Championships, athletes were selected based on performance criteria for USA Cycling, who then sent a group of selected athletes to compete in Chile against other teams from the Americas. Faulkner raced in two events on an indoor velodrome, a specialized arena for high-speed track cycling.
Faulkner competed alongside Olivia Cummins, Bethany Ingram and Emma Louise Jimenez Palos on Team USA in the cycling track team pursuit on Feb. 19. Sara Faulkner, Kristen’s mother, wrote in an email to the Homer News that this was the first competition in which these four riders raced together as a team. The USA team beat Canada in the qualifying round of the 4,000-meter race, and defeated Mexico in the finals to bring home the gold medal.
Faulkner previously won one of her two Olympic gold medals in the team pursuit during the Paris 2024 Summer Olympics.
“I race on the road most of the year in Europe — that’s my full-time job — so it’s actually really unique that I got to race on the track and get back with Team USA,” she said. “I hadn’t raced on the track since the Olympics, so it was really nice for me to get back on the track.”
On Feb. 21, Faulkner took her second Pan Am gold medal in the final round of the cycling track individual pursuit — her first time competing in this event — against fellow Team USA rider Emily Ehrlich, who was a Pan Am gold medalist in 2025. Sara Faulkner wrote that Kristen caught Ehrlich about three-quarters of the way through the 4,000-meter race for the automatic win.
“It’s always tough, because you do the team race together and then you do the individual race separately,” Faulkner said. “But Emily’s my really good friend, and it’s actually really nice to race with her, because I feel like we both have a lot of respect for each other. We really push each other.”
Ehrlich took second place in the track individual pursuit and won the silver medal. Team USA subsequently took home three medals from the Pan Am Championships — one for the team pursuit and two for the individual pursuit.
Prior to competing in the Pan Am Championships, Faulkner said she attended a camp in Los Angeles, where the 2028 Summer Olympics will be held.
“It was my first time on the actual track that’s going to be used for the Olympics — the LA velodrome is where we’re going to race the next Olympics — which was nice,” she said. “Basically it was symbolic, because it’s the first time since Paris, but also the start of the build towards the LA Olympics as well, which was exciting.
Faulkner said it was a good sign that Team USA did well at the Pan Am Championships as well, “because we’re starting to build now.”
Faulkner’s gold medal for the track individual pursuit at the Pan Am Championships automatically qualified her to compete in the individual pursuit at the World Championships in October.
In the meantime, she will next be racing in the Pan American Road Cycling Championships, held March 17-22 in Colombia. She will compete in the road race and time trial — “the same kind of events” as the competition in Chile “but on the road instead of on the track.”
After that, Faulkner will head to Europe to start her season and compete in “all the big European races.”
Learn more about Faulkner and find her upcoming race schedule at www.kristenfaulkner.com/.
