Marianne Vos took a silver medal in the women’s cycling road race at the Paris Olympics in stunning fashion.
After 98 miles of cycling, Vos beat out bronze-medal-winner Belgium’s Lotte Kopecky by literally four inches. Kata Blanka Vas of Hungary was edged off the podium by just a couple inches.
The three women all had an official time of 4:00:21.
American Kristen Faulkner won gold, the first American to do so in the race in 40 years.
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Vos’ silver comes 12 years after she won her last Olympic medal, a gold in the road race at the 2012 London Olympics. That’s an incredible gap to overcome, particularly in an individual sport.
In that time she’s won three World Championships in cyclo-cross and several other medals at in road race. Yet she settled for ninth at the Rio Olympics in 2016, and she finished fifth in Tokyo. Paris is her fifth Olympic Games.
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Now here she is, again on an Olympic medal podium.
Only a small number of athletes even compete in Olympics 12 years apart, with a large fraction of those in equestrian, where athletes can compete over several decades. Carl Hester, an out gay dressage rider from Great Britain, is competing in Paris, 32 years after his first Olympics in 1992.
Vos is currently in a relationship with fellow Dutch cyclist Moniek Tenniglo. The two have been in a relationship since 2017, Vos revealed the relationship when she won a stage of 2022’s Tour de France Femmes.
