Cyclist
Five of the best cycling moments from the Tokyo Olympics
It’s time for the greatest sporting event on the calendar. The Olympic Games officially begin on Friday 26th July and you won’t have to wait long for your first cycling fix, with the men’s and women’s road time-trials happening on Saturday 27th July.
Before then, let’s take a look back at the last Olympics in Tokyo 2021 to jog your memory of the best cycling moments and get you ready for Paris 2024.
Anna Kiesenhofer stuns field to wins road race gold
The Netherlands entered the Olympic Road Race with a dream team of superstars including Anna van der Breggen, Annemiek van Vleuten, Demi Vollering and Marianne Vos. But none of them would go on to win. Nor would Belgian powerhouse Lotte Kopecky. Instead the winner was a little-known rider from Austria who was an amateur at the time, with a PhD in mathematics. Her name was Anna Kiesenhofer.
Kiesenhofer was part of a five-rider breakaway that took off from the flag drop. Their lead grew to 11 minutes, while behind Germany helped work to close the gap and various members of the Dutch team attempted to attack with no success.
Kiesenhofer kicked away on the Kagosaka Pass and found herself alone at the front with 41km still to go. Behind her, a duo of her former breakaway companions Omer Shapira (Israel) and Anna Plichta (Poland) were chasing some way back but were caught by the pack in the last 5km.
With no race radios, the Dutch riders swarming the front of the peloton believed they were now at the head of the race, unaware that Kiesenhofer was still up the road. So when Van Vleuten attacked and stormed her way across the line, she raised her arms in celebration, believing she had just won the gold medal. In fact, that had already been claimed by Kiesenhofer, who had crossed the finish line a minute earlier.
The mathematician had won Austria’s only gold medal at the Tokyo Olympics and the country’s first since 2004.
BMX brilliance
BMX is among the most recent additions for cycling at the Olympics, with BMX Racing having featured since 2008 and Freestyle appearing for the first time at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021. With the new event came a new star for Britain.
Charlotte Worthington became the first ever BMX Freestyle Olympic Champion with an incredible performance that resulted in a score of 97.50, the maximum being 100. Part of her routine involved a 360° backflip, making her the first women in competition history to successfully land the trick, perfecting it on the second attempt after crashing on the first run.
Britain also had success in the BMX Racing discipline, with Kye Whyte taking silver in the men’s event and Beth Shriever going one better to take gold in the women’s. Their medals came within 11 minutes of each other, and the pair celebrating together is one of the images of the games.
The achievement is even more impressive when you consider the setback Shriever had been through to get there. UK Sport declared there would be no funding for the women’s BMX in the Tokyo Olympics cycle and Shriever dropped out of British Cycling’s programme in 2017. It took £50,000 of crowdfunding to get her to her gold medal moment.
Matt Walls’s historic Omnium gold
Track cycling takes many forms. Perhaps no event brings this home more than the omnium, which once boasted six events over two days at its most encompassing. In recent years it has changed its format, reducing to four events over one day to have a more endurance focus. The omnium now consists of the scratch race, tempo race, elimination race and points race.
At the Tokyo Olympics, the scratch race kicked things off, and Great Britain’s Matt Walls won after 40 laps to immediately place himself at the top of the omnium standings. He then finished third and second in the tempo and elimination races to remain in the gold medal position by four points from the Netherlands’ Jan-Willem van Schip.
Just one event remained: the points race. This involves 100 laps of the velodrome, with one to five points awarded for position after every 10 laps, and 20 points awarded for lapping the field.
Walls gained 19 sprint points and 20 lap points and it was enough for him to top the omnium table to win Great Britain’s first Omnium gold medal with 153 points.
A duo’s dominance on the track
Staying at the velodrome, the Tokyo Olympics marked the debut of the women’s Madison event, a two-rider, tag-team, hand-slinging battle over 120 laps. Great Britain had the experienced Katie Archibald and Laura Kenny as a pairing, both of whom were already Olympic gold medallists, Archibald in the team pursuit and Kenny across the team pursuit and omnium.
In one of the most dominant performances seen in a velodrome, Archibald and Kenny won ten of the 12 sprints available and lapped the field, amassing 78 points in total. Their closest competitors, Denmark, could only manage 35 points, which was still enough for silver.
In winning the Madison with Archibald, Kenny became the most successful female Olympian for Great Britain. Her husband Jason Kenny’s commanding seventh gold medal in the keirin meant he became the most successful male Olympian for Great Britain too.
From a broken collarbone to a gold medal
In June 2021, Tom Pidcock was hit by a driver while training and broke his collarbone. With only a matter of weeks to the Olympics, it looked like his campaign had been left at the side of the road, but he underwent surgery to be on the start line of the cross-country mountain bike race in Japan.
He avoided the early crash that forced the Netherlands’ Mathieu van der Poel to abandon and attacked persistently in the following laps, eventually gaining a gap on Switzerland’s Mathias Flueckiger and then leaving him behind completely on the penultimate lap. Pidcock had enough of an advantage to celebrate with a flag at the finish.
In winning Great Britain’s first Olympic gold in the race, he also became the youngest male winner in history.
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