An American's Guide to Olympic cycling

OUR LAST OLYMPIC PREVIEW. NOW IT'S TIME TO DO THE ACTUAL OLYMPICS

This is part 12 of RINGS RODGE, a 12-part series that was supposed to be 15 parts. You can probably get serious previews of the most popular sports on other sites… here, we’re doing unserious previews of sports that aren’t regularly on TV in between the four years between Olympics.

Today: CYCLING

Our last preview post is about cycling to fulfill a promise to Carter B. in the comments. I’m writing it with help from Michael Baumann, who writes Wheelysports, a Substack about cycling. He’s already posted a preview of today’s time trial events and will be following up with a preview of the road race next week.

The 2024 Olympic Time Trial Preview

It should be pretty easy to summarize cycling, right?

OMG you have no idea how many ways there are to ride a bike.

Cycling has the third-most medal events at the Olympics, behind just athletics and swimming. They can broadly be lumped into four categories:

• Road cycling: Like the Tour de France! There’s a time trial event which emphasizes sprinting and a road race that’s like a TDF stage with more hills and strategy required to win.

• Track cycling: Indoor races in a velodrome, an arena built specifically for track cycling.

• Mountain biking: A cross-country race on a hilly dirt course.

• BMX: Two X Games-styled events—a race and a tricks competition—done on BMX bikes.

The most complicated of these is track cycling, which can further be broken down into six different events—each of which is distinctly ridiculous in its own way.

• Sprint: A race where two riders go head-to-head to cross the finish line first. You’d expect this to be the simplest, most straightforward race possible, but instead there’s a lot of jockeying and gamesmanship to force the other rider to start pedaling first to draft behind them. Riders sometimes come to a complete stop during the race.

• Team sprint: An actual sprint race to see who can complete three laps without the you-go-first gameplay of the individual sprint. Each team starts with three riders, one of whom drops out each lap; whichever rider crosses the finish line first wins.

• Keirin: A guy on a little motorcycle paces the riders up to 50 kmh and then leaves, at which point the riders complete three laps without him. (I love the guy on the little motorcycle.)

• Pursuit: A team endurance race which can end when the riders complete four kilometers or, in rare cases, when one of the teams catches the other—hence pursuit. Teams have four riders, but only three need to cross the finish line. Riders take turns in the lead to avoid burnout.

• Madison: A chaotic tag team relay race where 16 duos try to complete 200 laps. Riders come in and out

• Omnium: A multi-race event combining a bunch of events and at this point I simply don’t have the energy to describe all the formats involved.

So it’s like the Tour de France? And they’re IN FRANCE?!?!?!

Yeah, but it’s not like the Tour de France, spiritually or visually.

The competitive highlight of the Tour is the run through the Alps, which test the greatest climbers in the sport. No mountains on the two courses in Paris, though. And the visual highlight of the Tour is the finish on the Champs-Elysées—but that section isn’t included in the Olympic courses, either. The Champs-Elysées section is totally flat, and traditionally doesn’t feature competitive racing for the general classification title. They needed to throw in some more diverse terrain to make the Olympic races interesting.

And in order to accommodate the preparations for the Paris Olympics, the actual Tour de France had to pick a finish line outside of Paris for the first time in the race’s history—Tadej Pogacar won in Nice last week.

Who’s going to win?

I’m going to turn things over to Michael here.

The first of those specialists to watch is Chloé Dygert, the 27-year-old American in her third Olympics. Dygert has won silver and bronze at the Olympics on the track, where she’s also won eight world championships. More relevant to this event, she’s a two-time world time trial champion, and yeah, what the hell, I’ll post the video of her first world championship ride again.

It’s been five years but it still makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up. You will never see a rider fuck everyone’s shit up worse than this, especially in a time trial.

Who else on Team USA can win?

We’re a BMX country. The #1 person you should be rooting for is Alise Willoughby, a 3-time world champion in BMX racing coming off a devastating Olympics in Tokyo. Willoughby took silver in Rio, but crashed in the semis in Tokyo, ending her medal hopes. Crashes happen in BMX racing. Sometimes it’s your fault and sometimes it’s not, but there are no do-overs. Willoughby has had to wait years to get her do-over, and is in top form—she won this year’s world championships.

And the favorite to win the BMX freestyle competition is Hannah Roberts, a five-time world champion who also probably deserved better than silver in Tokyo.

Dygert is also a star on the track, and has won back-to-back medals in the team pursuit event.