This time, probably for the final time, the exit plan is different. In 2008 and 2012, she took home time trial medals from Beijing and London, respectively. Five days in to Rio, the U.S.is still on top of the medal table with 32 total medals-11 gold, 11 silver, and 10 bronze.
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Her victory Wednesday was a thing of beauty, a triumph of the spirit over age and conventional wisdom.
Armstrong credits her teammate Mara Abbott for helping her believe she could win once more. The win drew reaction from the office of Boise Mayor Dave Bieter: What an wonderful accomplishment for Kristin.
Despite her longtime dominance, her win on Wednesday appears to come as a surprise. Armstrong, no relation to the disgraced cyclist Lance Armstrong, dealt with a mid-race nosebleed, too. Congratulations Kristin! he wrote. In addition to living in Tennessee and California, Kristin also lived in North Carolina, where she attended Havelock High School. The cyclist who won two bronze medals at the London Games tested positive in 2014 for a banned stimulant. “I thought, ‘Oh!’ But I had two choices, get nervous, or say I’m the most experienced person out here and just attack it”.
This is a developing story and will updated with more quotes from Armstrong shortly. It’s her third gold of this Olympics.
She led Wednesdays race by almost five seconds after about 6 miles into the 18.5-mile course, but dropped three seconds back of the lead at a second time check.
A clever answer would be nice to have, Armstrong said, but she adds that she has only one reply: “Because I can”. And with about 5k to go, he said, Here we go.
“I want to swear, but I shouldn’t”, said Armstrong’s USA teammate, Evelyn Stevens. And I was like, Well, its up to me? Armstrong and her family live in Idaho, where she works at a hospital and trains when she finds time to ride her bike.
A day before her 43rd birthday Armstrong, the last to tackle the 29.7km course, sped over the finish line 5.55 seconds faster than Russian Olga Zabelinskaya.
Van der Breggen was born in 1990.
“I think that for so long we’ve been told that we should be finished at a certain age”. Im not sure why.
– Kazakhstan has its first Olympic swimming medal – a gold one, at that. “That makes me smile because I have three kids of my own”‘.
Zabelinskaya said she was “happy” to end a traumatic week with a medal, having been about to board a plane home for Russian Federation two days before the Games started. “So when I came back I was focused on Rio and it’s been hard because I’ve had some poor performances over the last six months”. Time trial specialists with medal hopes are suspected of sometimes taking it easy in the road race competition, but Armstrong went full gas until dropping out late.
As Armstrong painfully pushed toward the finish in second place, her coach asked via the race radio what color medal she wanted.
Attention was split between controversial Zabelinskaya, for whom British entrant Emma Pooley expressed disdain in the countdown to the race, and fairy tale Armstrong who said afterwards she felt entirely amicable with her closest challenger on the day.
“That’s what we do, we cry when we’re happy, ” she replied. “I sometimes get them in dry weather, but this, I don’t know”.
The cyclist competed in the Olympic road race event earlier this week, but did not complete the course after falling off pace.
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“It’s a dream job”, she said.
