Jennifer Valente wins back-to-back golds in track cycling's Omnium

SAINT-QUENTIN-EN-YVELINE, France – The profile photo on Tom Valente’s Facebook page is from the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, a jubilant shot from the cycling velodrome of their family surrounding daughter Jennifer with her silver medal.

“We’re like, it would be nice to recreate that someday,” Tom said.

They had to wait eight years – the pandemic restrictions during the Tokyo Olympics in 2021 banned fans – but they finally did Sunday at the wooden velodrome east of Paris.

The only difference: This time, Valente was wearing a gold medal.

Valente repeated as Olympic champion in the Omnium, a grueling one-day event that consists of four different track races across a mere three hours in which riders accumulate points. Valente finished with 144, ahead of Poland’s Daria Pikulik (131) and New Zealand’s Ally Wollaston (125).

It was her second gold of these Olympics, to go with women’s team pursuit, and her fifth over three Olympics. That ties her with diver Greg Louganis, who also has five and is believed to be the most decorated Olympian with San Diego roots. No woman from the county has as many.

“Those are things that come out in the days and weeks later, that you realize maybe you were creating history,” Valente said. “But in the moment, it’s not on your mind.”

It capped a successful Olympics for the county. Sixty-five athletes with local ties — raised in San Diego, went to school there or live there currently — competed in the Summer Games, and they’re returning home with 27 total medals from 12 different sports.

Four others won gold: San Diego Wave FC players Naomi Girma and Jaedyn Shaw in women’s soccer, La Jolla County Day alum Kelsey Plum in women’s basketball and Keegan Palmer for Australia in men’s park skateboarding.

Four got silver. Seventeen got bronze, including the 12-woman U.S. rugby sevens team that is based at the Chula Vista Elite Athlete Training Center.

Or look at it this way: Excluding medals won as part of a larger team with athletes from elsewhere, and counting medals from a two-person event as a half, San Diego County (population 3.3 million) as its own country would rank 21st in the Paris medals table with 10.

Or another way: Only 28 entire countries won more gold medals here than the 29-year-old Valente.

“As a track rider, the Olympics is the big thing for us,” Valente said. “We have the World Championships and Nations Cups, but my career has always revolved around the Olympics. To be able to perform on this stage and perform well on the day has just been really a dream come true.

“This is the pinnacle of my career, and of anyone’s career, to win a gold medal. There’s nothing better than this.”

Most track cyclists come from other disciplines in the sport – road, cyclo-cross or mountain biking. Valente came from the track from the 48-year-old San Diego Velodrome in Balboa Park’s Morley Field.

Her parents took their daughter and two sons there, put them in beginner classes, let them ride the Tuesday Night Races when they got older.

“The culture was really positive,” said Tom Valente, an avid cyclist himself. “Old guys, girls, a good mix. Everybody had fun. It was a good, fun culture, and that kept her in cycling. We just wanted our kids to have fun and stay out of trouble and ride bikes.”

Valente was hooked.

“I certainly like bike racing because of track racing,” she said. “The track is so unique, it’s so fast, so many things happening. The feeling you get going as hard as you can into a bend, you can feel yourself being pushed against the track, you can feel the speed, that’s probably what I loved the most.”

She grew up in Scripps Ranch and attended Cathedral Catholic High School, as her brothers did, but had to switch to a correspondence school when the travel from racing became too demanding for in-person classes. She moved to Colorado Springs, Colo., and the Olympic Training Center, which has an indoor velodrome and is the home of the sport’s national federation.

It hasn’t been easy. Kelly Catlin, a member of the team pursuit silver medalists in Rio, committed suicide in March 2019 (her parents attribute it to side effects from a concussion suffered in a cycling crash two months earlier).

Valente has not spoken publicly about it. When asked by an Australian journalist Sunday to comment on Catlin’s legacy, Valente paused and said: “No.”

Valente has talked eloquently, however, about the internal debate whether to continue in a largely obscure sport that enters the world’s consciousness only once every four years.

“I’m sure every Olympian has similar stories, of all the setbacks and the struggles,” Tom Valente said. “It’s the classic thing where you have the iceberg and the giant stuff underneath. What people see is the (medals) podium up top, not the sacrifice and the discipline required.

“She wants to have a full life, and it can’t be cycling forever.”

For now, she has a full closet of medals, including back-to-back golds from a race designed to identify the world’s best all-around track cyclist.

It starts with the scratch race. She won that.

Then there’s a tempo race. She was second.

Then an elimination race, where the last-place rider is removed every other lap. She won that.

Then comes the 80-lap points race, with five-point sprints every 10 laps and a 20-point bonus for lapping the field. She started with a 10-point lead over Australia’s Georgia Baker, then won the first sprint and gradually built an unassailable margin.

“She’s a phenomenal athlete,” said Baker, who faded to fifth. “Her results speak for themselves. She’s super strong, she’s a super versatile rider, she can sprint, she’s super quick and she has the ability to take laps as well. It’s perfect for Omnium.”

Added Ireland’s Lara Gillespie: “When I’m racing her, she’s not too loud. She almost goes incognito. She’s really good at being consistent. That’s the whole thing about Omnium, it’s consistency. She really doesn’t have a bad race to let her down.”

Valente has five Olympic medals and nearly got a sixth here, finishing fourth with Lily Williams in the Madison event. Will she try to win a sixth or a seventh or an eighth at the 2028 Summer Games in Los Angeles?

Valente flashed a coy smile.

“Certainly as athletes get older and have other life obligations,” she said, “decisions of what you do with life outside of sport is a huge thing that takes many, many months and years to plan and digest.”

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