Ashton Lambie may have won the world title this year and become the first ever rider to break the four minute mark for the 4km individual pursuit, but his achievements have just been trumped by his partner.
Christina Birch is swapping her skin suit and track bike for a space suit and shuttle as she's just been unveiled among Nasa's latest 10-person intake of astronauts.
Birch, a 35-year-old former track international from Arizona, was among the 10 successful candidates to make the cut from 12,000 applications to Nasa's first recruitment competitions for astronauts in four years.
Birch was a member of the US longlist for the Tokyo Olympics. She is a three-time World Cup medalist, two-time Pan American Games gold medalist, and an 11-time US champion.
She has a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and another in biochemistry and molecular biophysics. She received her PhD - in biological engineering - from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where she joined the college's cycling team and began racing.
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Reacting to her unveiling as a trainee astronaut, Birch said she was "super excited", adding this latest development in an already high achieving life was "still surreal for me".
"It wasn't probably until I put on the blue flight suit for the first time that it actually started to feel real," she said.
"I distinctly remember when I submitted my application to be an astronaut candidate. I was sitting in the dorm rooms at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, and it was in between track workouts.
"I filled out my application online before we headed back to the track for some really hard efforts with the team. After the Olympic selection, I had a couple of interviews at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.
"Each one just left me feeling like this was a better fit for me and what I wanted to be doing, and that this is an environment that I really loved and would want to be a part of.
"Now that I'm here and I'm getting to know my classmates, it is just the most incredible team environment I could ask for especially coming from cycling, where that's something that I really enjoy."
