Outside Magazine

Gwen Jorgensen felt calm. Happy, even. It was an odd pre-race emotion for the 30-year-old triathlete, especially considering she was minutes away from starting the most important race of her life, at the Rio Olympics.

Since she raced her first triathlon, just six years earlier, plucked from a tax accounting job at Ernst & Young by USA Triathlon’s nascent Talent ID program, Jorgensen had qualified for two Olympic Games and earned two world champion titles. This was all during a 13-race winning streak from 2014 to 2016—the longest in the history of the sport for a female athlete. She crushed a qualifying event in Rio the year before the games, and now the world expected her to win again, this time to much greater fanfare.

Jorgensen, her lean 5'10" frame putting her a head above many of her 54 competitors, coolly adjusted her goggles and almost grinned while the other women shook out their legs, arms, and nerves. In the minutes before the athletes all ran down Copacabana Beach into the turquoise saltwater, the TV cameras hung on Jorgensen for a second. Soon they’d turn their focus to the Red Bull–sponsored Wisconsinite and keep it there for most of the run as Jorgensen kicked away from her closest rival with roughly two kilometers to go. She never looked back until she broke the tape. Then, for the first time ever at a finish line, she cried.