Best-ever 20-minute power and 3 Pan-Am golds: Inside the AI tech Olympic Champion Kristen Faulkner built, and is testing on, herself

Olympic champion Kristen Faulkner is pioneering the use of artificial intelligence to enhance athletic performance, drawing on nearly a decade of biometric data to build a personalised AI model tailored to women’s sports science. With an eye on the 2028 Los Angeles Games, Faulkner has combined her background in computer science and venture capital with her experience as a professional cyclist to develop a system that goes beyond traditional data dashboards. Her model aims to uncover the complex interactions between variables such as sleep, hormonal cycles, heat, and training load, providing deeper insights into how these factors influence performance and recovery over time. Faulkner’s approach is notable for its rigorous integration of diverse data sources, including heart rate variability, menstrual cycle phases, DEXA scans, and cycling power metrics. She personally codes the architecture and logic of the system, using AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude to accelerate development while maintaining strict oversight to ensure data quality and meaningful analysis. Unlike conventional dashboards that merely report isolated variables, her model seeks to explain causation and correlation, offering practical guidance on how to adjust training and recovery strategies when key factors fluctuate. The effectiveness of Faulkner’s AI-driven research was demonstrated at the Pan American Championships earlier this year, where she secured three gold medals and achieved her best-ever 20-minute power output. Beyond her own performance gains, she is motivated by the broader lack of female-specific sports science, highlighting how many training tools remain based on male physiology. Faulkner envisions her work as a step towards more individualised, evidence-based systems that better reflect the unique needs of women athletes, particularly in endurance sports. Faulkner’s project sits within a growing trend of AI applications in endurance sports, joining initiatives like Sir Bradley Wiggins’ AI coaching app and AI-powered bike fitting tools such as AiRO. Recently partnering with AI-focused content management platform Sanity, she is developing a mobile-friendly web application to share her insights more widely, though details on the product’s branding and rollout remain under wraps. Her ultimate aim is to refine and expand this technology, potentially transforming how athletes and coaches approach training through personalised, data-driven decision-making.