She arrived in Paris a relative unknown. But with 2 golds, Alaska’s Kristen Faulkner is leaving the Olympics as a household name.

Kristen Faulkner, of the United States, poses with the gold medal of the women's road cycling event, at the 2024 Summer Olympics, Sunday, Aug. 4, 2024, in Paris, France. (AP Photo/Thibault Camus) PARIS – Homer’s Kristen Faulkner arrived in Paris as just another of the 592 Olympians on Team USA.

Unheralded and unknown — at least compared to the contingent’s megastars, like sprinter Noah Lyles and swimmer Katie Ledecky — she will leave having made Olympic history, winning two gold medals over a four-day stretch in two distinctly different disciplines. And to make the fairytale even more compelling, national and international media have been falling over themselves to recount her improbable journey to becoming one of the great stories of these Games — how she only tried the sport in 2017, at the age of 24, after attending a free clinic in New York City, where she was working in venture capital after graduating from Harvard. “It hasn’t hit me yet, be honest,” she said Thursday evening, reflecting on the whirlwind experience in an interview at “USA House,” where she was about to be celebrated at a special event.

“It’s a big deal to me right now. And it’s definitely more than I expected from the Olympics. But I haven’t really turned on social media yet too much.

I haven’t read a lot of articles. I’ve tried to stay out of the media until my race was over, and that was just last night. And today has been a full day of media.

So, I actually haven’t .