Armstrong’s victory quickly became a family affair as she capped off ideal day, embracing her five-year-old son Lucas at the finish line. But he did ask me, ‘Momma, why are you crying?
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“That’s what we do, we cry when we’re happy, ” she replied.
“That last 5K, I knew it was close, and my coach behind me said, ‘You better decide what color medal you want today'”.
She becomes the oldest female Olympic cycling gold medalist. She announced in just April of a year ago that she was again coming out of retirement. One of the riders had beaten Armstrong in the national championships, putting her place on the team in doubt.
Cancellara will retire at the end of the 2016 season and he marked his final year in the sport by repeating the success he enjoyed at Beijing 2008. Then she retired again, only to return again in the spring of 2015. She was allowed to cut her hours down to 16 hours a week last fall, she said, so her family’s health insurance would remain in effect while she trained for the Rio Summer Games. “That’s so selfish!” That is not her view now. “When I looked out of the window at 4am I thought, ‘Oh no!’ But I had two choices, get nervous, or say I’m the most experienced person out here and just attack it”. It doesn’t matter what he grows up to be. And right now he just wants to be a Stars Wars Jedi. It doesn’t matter your age.
“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”.
Forget about Lucas trying to match it.
And so it came to pass on the day before her 43rd birthday as she made light of foul weather on Rio’s exotic coast to come out on top in the test of endurance and speed for the third consecutive Games. “It’s a great one”, he said.
Why keep coming back?
You may not have heard of Armstrong before because she doesn’t have high profile sponsorship deals and she’s not a regular on the media circuit.
Armstrong faced a big challenge on Sunday when she competed as part of Team USA in the women’s road race.
Abbott’s way to pump Armstrong up? “And this morning, on my podium bag, there was another one”. “[It] has been my secret weapon”, she said. “I went to brush my hair, I found another one on my brush”. It was obvious today’s circumstances would be much different from those in the road race. “I haven’t experienced this in all of my years”. “I feel this was the tightest team I’ve been on”.
How Armstrong shoved aside obstacles – be they age, skeptics, wind, or the rain that drenched the Rio pavement. The rain had let up by the race start, but the highly technical course filled with turns and steep climbs still was wet.
Russia’s Olga Zabelinskaya trailed Armstrong by 5.55s to pick up the silver medal with the bronze going to road race champion Anna van der Breggen of Holland in a time of 44:37.80.
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Armstrong also explained that this was the most hard of her four Olympics, starting with an eighth-place finish in the Athens road race in 2004.
