Alex Hunt
It is customary for riders who win the UCI Road World Championships to spend the following season racing aboard custom equipment adorned with the iconic rainbow bands. But for an even more exclusive group of riders, there is another honour: custom Olympic champions’ bikes.
Since the women’s World Championship road race was introduced in 1958, 46 different riders have worn the rainbow jersey. By comparison, only 11 women have won Olympic road race gold since the event debuted at the 1984 Los Angeles Games. It’s an exclusive club, and for those fortunate enough to join it, the reward often extends beyond the gold medal itself.
Ahead of the Tour de France Femmes, EF Education-Oatly surprised the current Olympic champion, Kristen Faulkner, with a custom gold-painted Cannondale Supersix Evo Lab71. The result is one of the most striking bikes in the peloton, and although it might not stand out quite as much as the SpongeBob SquarePants Factor Ones of Human Powered Health, it certainly turns heads.
Aside from the US national road race title she won in 2025, and the Pan-American TT title she won at the start of 2026, the Olympic road race was Faulkner’s last major victory. It was on the now familiar Parisian roads around Montmartre that Faulkner attacked clear of a group of four, three kilometres from the finish, to claim the Olympic title ahead of Marianne Vos and Lotte Kopocky.
Cannondale’s new SuperSix is more Evo 4.5 than Evo 5
The more everything changes, the more it stays the same.
While Faulkner held both the US national and Olympic titles at the same time last year, Faulkner was riding on a bike with a split identity, with a stars and stripes front end and a gold rear. However, after Kate Courtney claimed the US national road race title this year, Faulkner’s bike can fully embody the Olympic gold.
Much like Demi Vollering’s Specialized Tarmac SL9, Faulkner and the EF team are riding a new model that is hard to tell apart from the model it replaced. While the Supersix is now in its fifth generation, the silhouette remains largely unchanged from the fourth generation, albeit with some slight changes to the stack height.
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