Brownsburg native Chloe Dygert wins Olympic gold as part of women’s pursuit team

Chloe Dygert

MONTIGNY-LE-BRETONNEUX, France (AP) — The American women’s pursuit team—which includes Brownsburg native Chloe Dygert—raced to gold medal Wednesday at the Olympic Games.

The team had twice before raced for the Olympic gold medal, making the podium all three times the event had been on the program for the Summer Games.

Successful, to be sure, but also disappointing, because it had never been on the top step in previous attempts.

On a steamy night at the Olympic velodrome, road race champion Kristen Faulkner, time trial bronze medalist Dygert, Jennifer Valente and Lilly Williams finally took that last step up. They soared to a big early lead on New Zealand in their head-to-head showdown, then held on through a ragged finish to finally win the gold.

“We knew we had a strong team coming in,” Faulkner said with a smile, “and I feel like the lucky one, because they have won medals before on the track and I haven’t. I just wanted to live up to their expectations.”

Did she ever. Faulkner’s relatively recent addition to the squad might have made the difference.

“It’s pretty surreal,” Williams added. “I do not think anybody expected this.”

The Americans led by more than a second a quarter of the way through the 4,000-meter race, and they stretched the gap at one point to nearly two seconds. When they began to come apart from their single-file, aerodynamic draft with about two laps to go, they had to fight to the finish to hold off Ally Wollaston, Bryony Botha, Emily Shearman and Nicole Shields.

“There’s just a lot of support for this program,” said Dygert, who has been part of the past three U.S. Olympic pursuit teams, “and we’ve been able to bring in really strong riders, and now we were finally able to pull it off.”

Dygert, 27, was born and raised in Brownsburg and graduated from Brownsburg High School in 2015. A basketball player in high school, Dygert took up cycling while at Marian University in Indianapolis and excelled.

Despite a cycling career full of injuries, Dygert has piled up a long list of accomplishments in cycling, including four medals at the Olympics (one gold, one silver and two bronze) and multiple world championships in both team and individual events.

In the race for bronze, the British team of Elinor Barker, Josie Knight, Anna Morris and Jessica Roberts pulled back more than a second from Italy over the last half of its race to land on the podium for the fourth straight Summer Games.

The American women’s pursuit program had been chasing gold ever since the 2012 London Games, when it finished second to Britain. It lost a rematch four years later in Rio de Janeiro, and then in Tokyo, the U.S. had to beat Canada for bronze.

The Americans came to the velodrome outside of Paris with cautious optimism, though, buoyed by a lineup that already had a pair of medals. Dygert picked herself up from a crash and rallied through the rain to capture time trial bronze, and last weekend, Faulkner attacked in the closing kilometers to win the Americans’ first Olympic road race in 40 years.

After its qualifying time pit the U.S. against Britain in the semifinals, the quartet built a nearly half-second lead on its rival by the midway point of the race, and Dygert went to the front for the final lap to bring it home.

Then it was New Zealand’s turn, and the top qualifier brushed aside the Italians in their semifinal by nearly three seconds.

In the finals, the Americans showed that they were the class of the Paris Games.

“This has been meticulously put together for over a year, year after year,” said Valente, who now will team with Williams in the Madison later in the track cycling program before defending her Olympic title in the multidiscipline omnium.

“I’ve been part of this pursuit program for a long time, with a lot of different riders,” Valente said, “and to be able to pull together a really strong ride, and have it actually pay off—it’s just a really special moment.”