Anna Kiesenhofer: There’s blowing a field away in an Olympic race, and then there’s blowing a field away so much that the silver medalist mistakenly believes she won the gold.
Anna Kiesenhofer of Austria stunned the world by winning the women’s cycling road race at the Tokyo Olympics on Sunday. Kiesenhofer finished more than a minute ahead of the pack after breaking away from the peloton early in the race.
Annemiek van Vleuten of the Netherlands, who reached the finish line 1 minute and 15 seconds after Kiesenhofer and immediately began celebrating as if she had won gold, would be unlucky.
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To be fair to Van Vleuten, she wasn’t the only one who thought she had won the race. In an interview with the BBC, British racer Elizabeth Deignan, who finished 11th, congratulated the Dutch cyclist on her victory.