Four years ago, Megan Guarnier was on the losing end of a painful arbitration to win a spot on Team USA for the Olympic Games in London. Ahead of the Rio Games, the 31-year-old vowed she would not leave anything to chance. In 2012, she petitioned to be in the team as a support rider and lost. This year, she knew she had to prove that she was capable of winning a medal by beating the best in the world. To say she surpassed that goal would be an understatement.
Guarnier's Olympic journey began when she left home for Europe in 2013, racing a year with Rabo-Liv and then Boels Dolmans, travelling the globe, cranking out the miles, supporting her teammates and getting a smattering of results. In 2015, it all began to click.
Her victory in Strade Bianche kicked off a 16-month-long string of jaw-dropping results that includes two national championships, the bronze medal at the World Championships that earned her the trip to Rio, the Tour of California overall, the Giro Rosa overall, the lead in the women's WorldTour.
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She is now the number one rider in the world.
"After 2012, my coach and I decided that the Olympics was the goal, and we would try to make the automatic selection and never have it be a subjective process again," Guarnier told Cyclingnews before departing for Brazil. "We did that [at the 2015 World Championships] in Richmond, and I'm grateful for that because I had a whole winter to train and be very focused on Rio. If I hadn't gotten it in Richmond, I'd have tried really hard to have gotten it in the spring just to make it more of an objective process for me."
Despite all of those results, despite her position as undisputed top rider in the world, Guarnier is not expecting the US team to be devoted solely to racing for her in the road race on Sunday.
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