The U.S. invented mountain biking. Now It wants those Olympic medals, too.

There are silvers and there are silvers. This one was a mega deal for the United States–and a signal of what’s to come.

Haley Batten didn’t win the gold medal in mountain biking at the Summer Olympics, but the silver she earned Sunday was momentous. It was the best Olympic finish by a U.S. mountain biker ever—pulled off by a 25-year-old from Park City, Utah, who’d been targeting this day since she was 12.

Batten still remembers it–she was a lights-out junior, watching a pair of U.S. stars, Georgia Gould and Lea Davison, named to the Olympic team for London 2012.

Mountain biking in the Olympics?

Batten didn’t even know it was a thing. She was in.

“I wanted to be an Olympian," she told me.

She got there early, in 2021, in the Covid Summer Games in Tokyo, surprising the field with an impressive ninth-place finish. But 2024 was always the focus.

Batten is coached by the U.S. Olympic legend Kristin Armstrong, a three-time gold medalist on the road in the individual time trial. Armstrong may not be known primarily for mountain biking, but she gave Batten a Jedi’s blueprint on how to dial into the Games, how to prepare her body and peak at the right time.

“You break down the event and say, ‘What are the demands?’" Armstrong said. “What are the demands of a mountain bike race, a road race, a cyclocross race? You take that, and you can coach anything."

Batten entered this season on a tear–she won a short-track and cross-country World Cup race on the same weekend in Brazil, and she stayed hot into the European swing. She was ready to make some noise.

Now let us interrupt this Haley Batten story to say a little bit about the U.S. and mountain biking: Team USA is coming.

This is a sport born in the United States–Tom Ritchey, Gary Fisher and other assorted NorCal dreamers modifying klunker bikes to bomb down Mt. Tamalpais, creating a new machine and passion. Then the Europeans said thanks and dragged the discipline across the Atlantic, whizzing around Alpine single track, cultivating the sport and dominating its competitive circuit for generations.

There have been fabulous U.S. riders–Kate Courtney, raised in the shadow of Mt. Tam, won a World Championship and overall World Cup title not long ago–but the Olympics have been a dustbowl. Susan DeMattei won bronze at the inaugural mountain bike race at Atlanta 1996. Gould won bronze in London. That was it, for men and women.

Until Sunday. Batten never had a crack at gold–that prize was wrapped up early by France’s phenomenal Pauline Ferrand-Prevot, who got away from a small group on the second lap and au revoir. Nobody saw her the rest of the day. Ferrand-Prevot is a multi-time world champion who had this hometown race circled from the day it was announced, and that was that. She wound up winning by almost 3 minutes.

The rest of the podium was thoroughly up for grabs, however. Batten hung in. Mountain biking requires enormous power, technical skill and a not-insignificant amount of luck–you need to avoid punctures, crashes and other assorted catastrophes to remain upright and moving. Batten wrecked a wheel, but stayed calm as she got a replacement and worked her way back.

“My mind was right in the place it needed to be," she said.

She found a zone, and finally, a two-rider duel through the woods for silver and bronze with Sweden’s Jenny Rissveds, a gold-medal winner at Rio 2016. Batten and Rissveds took turns at the front until Batten surged into the final lap, creating space before a downhill stretch. By the finish, she had a 5-second gap. There was a brief kerfuffle over whether or not Batten should have been penalized for passing through the final feed zone without taking a bottle or any food. She wound up getting a fine. Her silver stood. Savilia Blunk of Inverness, Ca. wound up 12th–another strong U.S. result.

Batten was jubilant at the finish, wrapping colleagues and competitors in bear hugs. Her family–absent in Tokyo because of the pandemic restrictions–was in the rowdy crowd, too.

“They’re my everything," she said. “They make this all possible."

Not far from the finish, USA Cycling boss Brendan Quirk hailed Batten’s unprecedented Olympic performance.

“Haley’s a continuation of a lot of inspired, amazing women mountain bikers in the U.S.," Quirk said. “We’re really, really lucky to have her."

The future appears upbeat. In Monday’s men’s race, the U.S. will be represented by a pair of dynamos from Durango, Colo.,: 26-year-old Christopher Blevins, who won a World Cup race a couple of years ago, and Riley Amos, a 22-year-old who has been dominating the Under-23 circuit.

More young talent continues to funnel through the National Interscholastic Cycling Association (NICA). NorCal and the Rockies remain MTB hubs, and Bentonville, Ark., and its network of world-class trails is becoming a destination for training and competition.

“The energy is really, really high," Kristin Armstrong said.

At the front, medal winner Haley Batten remains hungry.

“I don’t want to be behind France and Switzerland anymore," she said. “I’m sick of that. I’m ready for the USA to win some relay races, to win world championships, to win Olympic medals. We’re just getting started. We’re going to get so much better."

Write to Jason Gay at Jason.Gay@wsj.com