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"The last ice age only lasted as long as it did because there was no cyclo-cross racing"

Cycling Weekly

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February 06, 2025

The Doc's plan for a Winter Olympics with cycling has a flaw

"The last ice age only lasted as long as it did because there was no cyclo-cross racing"

One of the semi-regular bits of low-level warfare that cycling enjoys is attempting to get cycling into the Winter Olympics as well as the Summer. This is part of our plan for world domination - eventually all sports will be cycling and we can stop worrying about what sports TV channel to subscribe to.

Most commonly, the suggestion has been that cyclo-cross should be in the Winter Olympics, on the basis that you do cyclo-cross in winter. There are other Summer Olympic sports that happen in winter, like football, but of course you can do these in summer too. You can't do cyclo-cross when the weather is warm, because if you did people would notice that it was more or less the same as cross-country mountain biking. That is already in the Olympics, and in our quest for world domination, we wouldn't want to draw attention to this.

More recently an idea has been floated that track cycling would also be better off in the Winter Games. And, until recently the UCI had indeed made track into a winter event, simply by scheduling the international events and the Worlds over the winter. Add to that the rich tradition of six-day racing, which is definitely a winter pastime, and it starts to seem almost rational.

imageThere would be upsides. I think that if you took the Olympic track meeting away from the road season altogether it might get more attention all round. It would let riders double up more easily and almost certainly give us enough space in the Games schedule to increase the number of track events - we might finally get the individual pursuit back, perhaps even the kilo.

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