Cycling

Olympic cycling has four disciplines: road racing (the road race and the time trial), track cycling (sprint, keirin and team events in the velodrome), BMX (racing and freestyle) and mountain biking (cross-country).

History

The bicycle's ancestor is the pedal-less "draisine" invented in Germany in 1817. The Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI) was founded in 1900. Cycling has been an Olympic sport since 1896; mountain biking was added in 1996 and BMX in 2008. The world's most famous stage race, the Tour de France, has been held since 1903.

Major competitions

The three Grand Tours — the Tour de France, Italy's Giro and Spain's Vuelta; the Olympic Games; the UCI World Championships; and one-day classics such as Paris–Roubaix.

Cycling in the Turkic world

Uzbekistan's Djamolidine Abdoujaparov, the "Tashkent Express", won the Tour de France green jersey for the best sprinter three times (1991, 1993, 1994). Kazakhstan's Alexander Vinokourov won the Olympic road race in London in 2012, and the Astana team he built won the Tour de France twice (Contador in 2009, Nibali in 2014).

The Presidential Cycling Tour of Türkiye and the Tour d'Azerbaïdjan are international UCI races. The 2022 Giro d'Italia started in Budapest, and in 2021 Hungary's Attila Valter became the first Hungarian to wear the Giro's pink leader's jersey.