One brave Australian emerged from a field of bloody, bruised and battered riders with a gold medal around her neck. Editor at Large Louise Evans pays homage to Australia’s inaugural 2024 Olympic champion Grace Brown.
Australia’s first gold medal of the Games was won in masterful style by road cycling time trial warrior Grace Brown, who survived treacherous conditions which shredded the skin and dreams of rival riders on the saturated streets of Paris.
The Olympic time trial is called the race of truth because it pits sole cyclists against the clock over a 32.4km road course.
The Olympic course was made even harder because of relentless rain which turned the ever changing surface – which switched from cement to cobble stones and bitumen – into a series of slippery slides.
Brown was one of the 35 riders who kept her wheels under her despite a slight slip on the start ramp.
She recovered from that hiccup and attacked the course, staking her claim on the gold medal by the 13km mark. “To be first at that point, feel really strong still and know that I wasn’t fading at all, then I was confident that I could take it all the way to the finish. And I did,” Brown said.
While other riders fell victim to the conditions as they slipped, slid and crashed, the rider from Camperdown Victoria, stayed upright and continued to build and extend her lead to win in 39min38.24.
Such was her dominance, she won by a crushing 1min31.59 ahead of Anna Henderson of Great Britain and a badly beaten-up Chloe Dygert, the world time trial champion from the USA, in 41min10.70.
“It means so much,” Brown said. “Just to make Australia proud, winning the first gold medal for our nation, setting the medal table on its way. I hope I inspire the other athletes to push their limits and go after similar results.”
It was a career-defining performance, which is ironic for Brown, 32, who earlier this year announced she’d be retiring after three seasons riding for French pro team FDJ-Suez. But what a way to say au revoir.
Because of her French connections, Brown had plenty of support from the Paris crowd who love road racing. Despite the rain, they lined the course which started at the Invalides in central Paris then tracked east past Saint Germain and the Bastille and eventually back to the finish at Pont Alexandre III, the bridge over the Seine River.
Riding in Paris in the green and gold was about redemption for Grace who finished fourth at the Tokyo Olympics by less than seven seconds, a result which “left me with a desire to go for more”. “I have big goals in Paris and that is to go after a medal on the first day of competition,” she said ominously before the start.
Brown came to the Olympics as a medal favourite as a result of being the 2022 and 2023 world championship time trial silver medallist.
Riders had limited reconnaissance time on the course, which was done in dry conditions. Little were they to know that the rain would leave them bloody battered and bruised. But not Brown.
She came over the finish line without a scratch and a smile as wide as the great outdoors.
“Because it was wet, we had to go a bit slower through the corners and that helped me take some little breaks along the way,” she said. “I didn’t really know that a lot of my competitors were crashing.
“So it sounds like I was lucky to stay upright in the end. Sometimes that is just bad luck, or luck to me this time. So I’m glad that was the case for me. And I’m sorry for my competitors.
“If you’re starting and you know that everyone’s crashing, then you have a little bit more fear about the race. So it was good that I didn’t know.”
Brown also paid tribute to her Australian and French teams who invested so much time and effort to help her reach the finish line first. “There was a big team behind me putting a lot of work and belief in me,” she said.
“Being away from Australia a lot of the year, being away from my family, that’s given me the impetus to work really hard and make it all worth it.”
Louise Evans is an award-winning journalist who has worked around Australia and the world as a reporter, foreign correspondent, editor and media executive for media platforms including The Sydney Morning Herald (eight years), The Australian (11 years) and Australian Associated Press (six years in London, Beijing and Sydney).
A women sports’ pioneer, Louise was the first female sports journalist employed by The Sydney Morning Herald and the first female sports editor at The Australian. Louise went on to work at six Olympic Games, six Commonwealth Games and numerous world sporting championships and grand slam tennis events.
Louise is the Founding Editor of AAP FactCheck, the Creator of #WISPAA – Women in Sport Photo Action Awards and national touring Exhibition and the author and producer of the Passage to Pusan book, documentary and exhibition.
In 2019 she was awarded the Order of Australia Medal (OAM) Queen’s Honour for services to the media and sport and named an Australian Financial Review Top 100 Woman of Influence for services to the arts, culture and sport.
In 2020 she won a NSW Volunteer of the Year Award plus the NSW Government Community Service Award for her women-in-sport advocacy work.
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