Cycling at the 2020 Summer Olympics

Cycling
at the Games of the XXXII Olympiad
Pictograms from top, left to right: BMX Freestyle, BMX Racing, Road, Mountain and Track cycling.
VenueOlympic BMX Course
Izu Mountain Bike Course
Izu Velodrome
Musashinonomori Park
Fuji Speedway
Dates24 July – 8 August 2021
No. of events22
Competitors530 from 73 nations
← 2016
2024 →
Cycling at the
2020 Summer Olympics
List of cyclists
Qualification
Road cycling
Road racemenwomen
Time trialmenwomen
Track cycling
Sprintmenwomen
Team sprintmenwomen
Keirinmenwomen
Team pursuitmenwomen
Madisonmenwomen
Omniummenwomen
Mountain biking
Cross-countrymenwomen
BMX
BMX racingmenwomen
BMX freestylemenwomen

The cycling competitions of the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo featured 22 events in five disciplines.[1][2][3][4][5] The 2020 Olympics were postponed to 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.[6]

Cycling competitions had been contested in every Summer Olympics programme since the first modern Olympiad in 1896 alongside athletics, artistic gymnastics, fencing and swimming.

Since the 1896 contests which featured five track events and an 87 km road race from Athens to Marathon and back, Olympic cycling had gradually evolved to include women's competitions, mountain bike and BMX to arrive at the current 22 events.

The cycling program for this edition was expanded with 4 more events than those held in 2016. BMX freestyle was added in the program for the first time and there will also be a return of Madison events on the track that had been removed from the Olympic program in 2012. The award of the extra events was widely seen as a reward for the agreement of the UCI that the track cycling and mountain bike events be taken out of Tokyo and held in Izu, Shizuoka, allowing for significant costs savings to the organising committee. As Izu was not covered by the state of emergency imposed by the Japanese government, cycling was one of the very few sports at these games that allowed a limited number of local spectators to attend.

Great Britain's stranglehold on the velodrome events slackened for the first time since 2008, with their three golds matched by the Netherlands and six other golds shared among six nations. They also failed to win a road medal for the first time since 2004. Nevertheless, with three golds, three silvers and a bronze inside the velodrome, and a hugely successful mountain bike and BMX campaign outside it (three golds, a silver and a bronze from the six events) for the fourth Olympics in a row, Great Britain topped the medal table in cycling with twelve medals, six gold, closely followed by the Netherlands with twelve medals but five golds. Between them the two top nations won half of all the 22 gold medals on offer in cycling; no other nation won more than one, and aside from 12 medals won by each of the 'Big 2', only the Swiss managed more than three medals in total, thanks to their dominance of the mountain bike podium (winning 4 medals from 6).

During the Games, Jason Kenny and Laura Kenny respectively took the records for the most successful male and female Olympic cyclists in history, Jason with a seventh gold in men's keirin, and Laura with a fifth in women's madison. They also became their nation's most successful male and female Olympians in history.

  1. ^ "Cycling BMX Freestyle". Tokyo2020.org. Retrieved 14 July 2021.
  2. ^ "Cycling BMX Racing". Tokyo2020.org. Archived from the original on 9 May 2021. Retrieved 14 July 2021.
  3. ^ "Cycling Mountain Bike". Tokyo2020.org. Archived from the original on 14 May 2021. Retrieved 14 July 2021.
  4. ^ "Cycling Road". Tokyo2020.org. Retrieved 14 July 2021.
  5. ^ "Cycling Track". Tokyo2020.org. Archived from the original on 9 May 2021. Retrieved 14 July 2021.
  6. ^ "Joint Statement from the International Olympic Committee and the Tokyo 2020 Organising Committee". IOC. 24 March 2020. Retrieved 15 April 2022.