Kristin Armstrong hugs her son Lucas Armstrong Savola, 5, after she won the gold medal in the women’s cycling road individual time trial at Rio 2016 on Wednesday, August 10, 2016.
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However, Armstrong, who had been a controversial selection for the Olympic Games, stormed home to take her third gold medal, beating Zabelinskaya by five seconds and equalling Leontien van Moorsel’s record of three road gold medals.
Her victory pushed Russia’s Olga Zabelinskaya, who clocked 44:31.97, into the silver medal position while Dutch rider Anna van der Breggen, already the Rio road race champion, added another medal with bronze in 44:37.80.
“This is why I came back”, the USA cyclist Kristin Armstrong said early Wednesday afternoon.
“People look at me as a fierce competitor, but I also have feelings”, she said. “The best answer I can give is that I can”.
“I am clean for myself, for my kids, for everything, when I got this problem with doping, I had my third child and I breastfeeded in this time”. “It was my competition and I came on top today and I was really happy for it”. “I had my ticket to go back to Russian Federation”. You can’t quantify the difference she’s made in the community. “It’s something she hadn’t really done in the past to prepare for her previous Olympic Games”.
“I have always loved that we were all born with the power to believe and to believe in ourselves”, Armstrong said later.
In order to get more information on her, sports fans have been searching for terms like, “Kristin Armstrong and Lance Armstrong”, “Kristin Armstrong related to Lance?” and “Lance Armstrong sister”. She’s 43 and after repeatedly being asked why she had come out of retirement for Rio, why she’s still going in spite of several hip operations and why she’s competing even though she’s the oldest in her race, she replied simply: “because I can”. Her training began only 18 months ago, and Armstrong said it wasn’t until March that she started reaching the power outputs close to her 2012 London run.
U.S. guard Kyle Lowry (7) shoots the ball against Australia center Andrew Bogut (6) during men’s basketball preliminary round in the Rio 2016 Summer Olympic Games at Carioca Arena 1. She hadn’t competed enough in recent worldwide events, some said. She says that while age means that recovery can take much longer, her extra years of experience, her mental approach and technical equipment provide an advantage.
“She prepares for the big days like no other”, said Palo Alto physician Christine Thorburn, a two-time Olympic teammate of Armstrong’s.
Her secret weapon, she said Wednesday, is balance.
Unlike American swimmer Lily King this week, Armstrong declined to ridicule her opponent. “I thought it was just water”, she said, then tried to swipe it away only to see her hands were bloody.
Armstrong plans to return home to Boise on Monday. Tokyo 2020? Armstrong said she no intentions of making yet another comeback.
Armstrong said she still does not know if winning a third gold represented “closure” for her stop-start career.
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She won gold Wednesday despite weather conditions that would make most of us crawl back under the covers and order room service.
