The U.S. invented mountain biking. Now It wants those Olympic medals, too.
Elancourt, France There are silvers and there are silvers. This one was a mega deal for the United States–and a signal of what’s to come. Haley Batten didn’t win the gold medal in mountain biking at the Summer Olympics, but the silver she earned Sunday was momentous.
It was the best Olympic finish by a U.S. mountain biker ever—pulled off by a 25-year-old from Park City, Utah, who’d been targeting this day since she was 12. Batten still remembers it–she was a lights-out junior, watching a pair of U.S.
stars, Georgia Gould and Lea Davison, named to the Olympic team for London 2012. Mountain biking in the Olympics? Batten didn’t even know it was a thing. She was in.
“I wanted to be an Olympian," she told me. She got there early, in 2021, in the Covid Summer Games in Tokyo, surprising the field with an impressive ninth-place finish. But 2024 was always the focus.
Batten is coached by the U.S. Olympic legend Kristin Armstrong, a three-time gold medalist on the road in the individual time trial. Armstrong may not be known primarily for mountain biking, but she gave Batten a Jedi’s blueprint on how to dial into the Games, how to prepare her body and peak at the right time.
“You break down the event and say, ‘What are the demands?’" Armstrong said. “What are the demands of a mountain bike race, a road race, a cyclocross race? You take that, and you can coach anything." Batten entered this season on a tear–she won a short-track and cross-country World Cup race on the same weekend in Brazil, and she stayed hot into the European swing. She was ready to make some noise.
Now let us interrupt this Haley Batten story to say a little bit about the U.S. and mountain biking: Team USA is coming. This is a sport born in the United
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