It’s three o'clock in the afternoon of 8 April 1896. Ten competitors enter the Neo Phaliron velodrome in the Greek capital, Athens. They are French, American, English, German, Greek and Austrian. The wind blows in constant gusts that have the spectators clutching at their hats. Among the 20,000 people watching is none other than the Greek royal family, who have not missed a single event in the first three days that the first Olympic Games of the modern era have been underway. So horrific are the conditions that the competitors, who have set out for three hundred laps of the track, dismount one after the other. All except two: the Frenchman Léon Flameng, son of a naval painter, and the Greek Georgios Kolletis.
When the latter is forced to stop to do some repairs, Flameng waits for him. He doesn't want to finish alone. Not so many laps from the finish, exhausted by his repeated exposure to the headwind, the 21-year-old Parisian falls heavily. But he sets off again, amidst cheers and applause, and takes victory by fourteen laps over the last of his opponents. Won over by this feat, the spectators take off their hats one by one, in the same gesture as the royal family, as the French flag rises on the mast. Cycling’s Olympic history had just begun. The 100km track race would only be held once more, in London in 1908, and would see British cyclists Charles Bartlett and Charles Denny win the sprint ahead of Octave Lapize, future winner of the Tour de France, who would die at the controls of his airplane in July 1917, as Léon Flameng had six months earlier. A Franco-British duel reflecting two approaches to cycling that would soon coexist and become part of the history of this sport.
Like all sports involving mechanics, cycling has seen its practice, and at the same time its calendar, evolve in line with technical and societal developments. This evolution is particularly striking in this history of cycling at the Olympics, whose programme has been constantly revised until now, when a certain stability finally seems to be in place. In 2012 and then in 2020, the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI) and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) achieved what is undoubtedly the most important objective of the overhaul of the Games calendar: harmonisation between the men's and women's events. But it took a lot of effort to get there, especially as on the way, new disciplines (mountain bike, BMX Racing and BMX Freestyle) have enriched the cycling programme.
It is nevertheless an interesting fact that only two events from the first modern Olympic Games in 1896 have survived: the sprint on the track and the road race on the road. This is not surprising. These two events are the pillars of cycling and the jewels in the crown of the two disciplines which have divided cycling’s practitioners into two populations: road cyclists and track cyclists.
This division is all the more fundamental in the history of cycling as it also reflects a cultural diversity and joins another critical divide in the history of Olympism and cycling: amateurism and professionalism.
Particularisms
When Baron Pierre de Coubertin decides, in 1894, to revive the Olympic Games and hold them two years later in Athens, cycling is already a popular and structured sport. So popular, in fact, that it is one of the first athletic sports, along with boxing, to be able to pay its athletes. Professionalism therefore developed both on the track and on the road, particularly in France, Belgium and Italy. England, which is nevertheless a pioneer when it comes to cycling, remains fiercely attached to amateurism, meaning its road cycling is less developed (this is also the case in the United States). Road events in England are essentially contested against the clock, and city-to-city races are extremely rare. This would mean the development of parallel cycling cultures, which the Olympic calendar would reflect through the choice of organising cities.
This particularity is especially striking during the Games in Saint Louis, USA, in 1904. There is no denying that the first three editions of the Olympic Games are all in their hesitant infancy. In Athens, it’s a question of breaking new ground; in Paris, the events are organised on the fringe of the Universal Exhibition and the athletes do not even realise they are participating in the Games; and in Saint Louis, the gulf that has already opened up between American and European sports is evident. Thus, all the cycling events contested during these first Games in the United States (1/4 mile, 1/3 mile, 1/2 mile, mile, two miles, five miles and 25 miles) are contested for the first and last time. Moreover, all the competitors are American (Marcus Hurley takes the opportunity to become the first quadruple Olympic Champion in the history of cycling). But little by little – with the playing its part – the disciplines are harmonising, with each cycling culture making its contribution. Admittedly, there are no more road races between 1896 and 1936 – apart from one at the ‘intercalated’ Games of 1906 – but this is mainly because, at this time, the organisers of the major Classics on the professional calendar are jealously asserting their own prerogatives and also because the best road racers are all professionals.
London in 1904, on the other hand, sees the arrival of the team pursuit, an event that is part of the British cycling genome and in which the United Kingdom would achieve some of its most convincing results on the track (even if Italy, Germany and later Australia would also prove to be major nations). It is in Stockholm, in 1912, that the road makes its return to the Olympic programme, but in the form of a time trial which corresponds more to the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ practice. The first five in the event, won by South African Rudolph Lewis, are English-speaking. However, it is anything but a traditional time trial. The course, which is laid out around Lake Mälar, is 320 km long, and the riders spend almost eleven hours in the saddle, with the first starting at two in the morning. Rudolph ‘Okey’ Lewis remains the only African Olympic Champion in the history of cycling. In the same year, a road race team title appears which, until 1960 in Rome, would be calculated according to the results of the individual race, whether a time trial (until 1932) or an open road race (from 1932 to 1960, when a veritable team time trial is organised). Finally, in 1996, with the arrival of professionals at the Olympic Games, the road cycling calendar is frozen and only includes two individual races (one road race and one solo effort) for both men and women.
All on the track
The track programme also takes full account of the cultural diversity of cycling. Thus, in 2000 in Sydney, the points race, inspired by the Six Day events that were very popular in continental Europe at the beginning of the century and definitively introduced in 1984 in Los Angeles, is joined by the ‘American’ or Madison. This new addition is a two-rider variant invented in 1898 by the owner of Madison Square Garden to circumvent New York State laws prohibiting six-day races, too exhausting for the riders. In 2020, the Madison also made its entry into the women's Olympic programme.
It is also in Sydney that we witness the appearance of the keirin, the most popular cycling sport in Japan since its invention in 1948. It has been on the programme of the UCI World Championships since 1980 for men and 2002 for women, who saw the event added to their Olympic calendar in London in 2012.
The rise of women's cycling is one of the most significant developments in Olympic history, and since the road race organised in Los Angeles in 1984, the programme has gradually expanded to correspond exactly to that of the men, as have the participant quotas reserved for the two categories. American Connie Carpenter, who began her Olympic career in speed skating, is a pioneer thanks to her very narrow victory in the inaugural Olympic women's road race ahead of her compatriot Rebecca Twigg in Mission Viejo. The two young women, more track cycling specialists, had trained specifically for this first Olympic road race and on the day, they managed to outdo the two European favourites, Maria Canins (ITA) and Jeannie Longo (FRA).
The second major milestone in cycling’s Olympic history remains the inclusion of professionals as of the Atlanta Games in 1996. Unlike athletics or swimming, the king sports of the Olympics, cycling could not field its best representatives at the Games, such as track UCI World Champions or winners of the major Classics or Grand Tours on the road. Unlike boxing, cycling at the Games was not even a stepping-stone to a professional career, as the most talented riders attached relatively little importance to Olympic medals. Glory lay elsewhere.
Young blood
The Olympics are thus the only gap in the unrivalled record of the greatest cyclist of all time, Eddy Merckx, who had to settle for 12th place in the road race at the Tokyo Games in 1964. His son Axel fared better by winning the bronze medal at the Athens Games in 2004, a sign that times had changed. The list of Olympic road race winners before 1996 does, however, include some big names who would go on to have successful careers, such as Ercole Baldini and Hennie Kuiper, future road race UCI World Champions, but it was only from Atlanta onwards that the lists of winners from the Olympics and the UCI World Championship would finally begin to coincide.
Cultural diversity again with the arrival, also in 1996, of mountain bike, a discipline born after the creation of specific equipment in the United States in the 1970s and which developed on the North American continent before achieving worldwide success. The sport brought a breath of fresh air to the other cycling disciplines, and it is another feature of the evolution of the Olympic programme that many cyclists now excel in different disciplines: the two-time reigning Olympic Champion for mountain bike, Tom Pidcock, is also one of the best road cyclists in the world. Indeed versatility, although it has always existed, seems to be becoming the norm. It should be noted that some of the best road race athletes of the 21st century, such as Cadel Evans, winner of the 2011 Tour de France, and Peter Sagan, three-time road race UCI World Champion (2015, 2016 and 2017), also competed at the Olympics in mountain bike. This eclecticism is a characteristic of cycling, judging by the fact that of the seven athletes who have won medals at both the Summer and Winter Games, two are cyclists: Clara Hughes and Claudia Ludin-Rothenburger, who were also Olympic Champions in speed skating.
The latest additions to the cycling family are BMX Racing, a kind of motorcross without a motor, and BMX Freestyle, which consists of performing tricks like those on a skateboard or in freestyle skiing. Both disciplines originated in California in the 1960s. With its vocabulary and practices inspired by urban cultures and other sporting disciplines that are willingly rebellious, such as surfing or skateboarding, BMX, particularly spectacular in its two formats, brings a final youthful touch to cycling. And the three Frenchmen who took the podium in BMX Racing in 2024 in Paris are in some ways the heirs of Léon Flameng, 128 years after the first Olympic cycling event. One hundred and thirty years after those Athens Games, France and Great Britain, the founding nations of the sport, still have the most prestigious record in Olympic cycling, with over one hundred medals each. But over the course of this long history so far, no fewer than 47 nations have stood on the podium at the Games, a sign that cycling today is a global phenomenon.