Paris Olympics: Santa Cruz’s Haley Batten makes history for Team USA

With the pink and blue Olympics arch looming just 25 meters ahead, Haley Batten risked a look behind her. She needed to know if Jenny Rissveds of Sweden was closing in. She needed to know if the silver medal — the best Olympic result ever from an American mountain biker — could really be hers.

Elancourt, FRANCE— With the pink and blue Olympics arch looming just 25 meters ahead, Haley Batten risked a look behind her.

She needed to know if Jenny Rissveds of Sweden was closing in. She needed to know if the silver medal — the best Olympic result ever from an American mountain biker — could really be hers.

When Batten saw Rissveds wouldn’t catch her, she lifted her hands from her handlebars and cruised across the finish with them raised high above her head. Her entire face was a grin.

Not injuries, not concussions, not even a shattered rear wheel midway through Sunday’s race at Elancourt Hill, about 30 miles west of Paris, could knock Batten off her path. She’d set out to win an Olympic medal, targeting the 2024 games even before she rode to ninth at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021. Now, she’s done it.

“I had so much special inside me today,” she said. “My legs never hurt or anything. I don’t know what it was. I just wanted it so bad.”

 

Pauline Ferrand Prevot ran away with the race to finally add the last jewel to her mountain biking crown, and on home soil to boot. The Frenchwoman won the gold medal in her fourth Olympics by finishing her seventh and final lap of the roughly 2 ½-mile course nearly three minutes ahead of Batten. Bronze medalist Rissveds, the gold medalist from 2016, finished 5 seconds later.

Batten’s coach, three-time road cycling gold medalist Kristen Armstrong, never doubted the kid who calls Santa Cruz home could claim a medal once she set her mind to the task.

“She has this ability,” Armstrong said, “to focus extremely.”

It took all of that focus, though, as well as a huge helping of grit for Batten to secure the silver.

Batten, 25, missed five days with a concussion, her second, after crashing at an Olympic test event on the course in May. Then an Achilles injury sidelined her a month before the race. As a result, she fell out of the top eight points earners — costing her an esteemed spot on the front row. More than disheartening, it put Batten at a strategic disadvantage. Four riders created a near-instant gap on the field, and all of them started in the front row.

One was Ferrand Privot, who had built a virtually insurmountable lead before the race was half over. Meanwhile, Puck Pieterse of the Netherlands seemed like she had a monopoly on second. Riding strong and attacking the climbs, Batten was couched to join and possibly surpass the chase pack. That would have put her in position for the bronze.

But the boulders had other ideas.

Batten destroyed her rear wheel on a wooded, rocky section along the first third of the course. According to race rules, she could replace the wheel, but only in a certain section located in the final third. So, she picked up her bike and ran.

“That was really disappointing,” Batten said. “I worried I lost my chance at a medal. But I have one of the best mechanics in the world and he was able to fix it. And I think that just fueled my fire.”

No looking back, just looking forward.

By the end of the fifth lap, Batten was back with the second chase pack again. Which proved just where she needed to be when Pieterse experienced her own flat. Seeing her opening, Batten surged forward with Rissveds right on her tail.

During the effort, Batten apparently cut through a zone meant for athletes getting food, liquids or mechanical help. Since she got none of those, she violated a race rule and officials asked Rissveds if she would like to protest the result. It appears Rissveds did not, and the Associated Press reported that officials instead fined Batten 500 Swiss francs, or about $565, for “failure to respect the instructions of the race organization or commissaires.”

“There was a lot of things going on out there today. It was pretty chaotic,” Rissveds said. “But I guess we knew it was going to be like that since it’s the Olympics and everyone is really excited —  almost too excited.”

Not until the final climb did Batten finally shake Rissveds. Even then, Batten kept her eyes forward, focused on the prize and an area a little beyond the finish line. That was where her parents Pat and Cathy Batten of Santa Cruz and her brother Nash had camped out to watch her.

Now that she has her medal, though, Batten said she’s focused on another goal: taking a page from Ferrand Prevot’s script and winning gold on her home soil.

It just so happens that Los Angeles is set to host the 2028 Games

“I got to see Pauline win here,” Batten said, “and the next one’s mine.”

Now that she’s made it her goal, there’s no looking back.